[Leaplist] Name Service Cache Daemon (nscd)

[Andrew Anderson]

On Jan 7, 2010, at 10:21 AM, Kevin Inscoe wrote:

> I have a constant battle at work about the nscd daemon. I have
> consistently had problems with it in both Solaris and RHEL. I am being
> asked (read semi-forced) to institute it again (I am the one of the
> Linux build masters for the company) in RHEL 4 and 5 . I would be
> grateful for any hard evidence documentation from any where to either
> it's benefits or problems in production environments. Personal
> anecdotes are also welcome. Yes I have STFG.

It depends on your environments and the services that you are running.

One case where it helped out tremendously was on high-volume download FTP servers that were setup with network-based authentication for admin access.  Each and every client connection triggered name service lookups, and that lookups traffic was non-trivial.  By enabling nscd, the traffic dropped dramatically and response times improved.  Depending on the services you offer, and how they are configured, you may or may not see similar benefits.

For example, a web server out of the box probably would not see much improvement, unless you 1) set it up to do reverse DNS lookups on incoming connections for name-based host access controls, or 2) use a network authentication service for user-based access controls.  In those setups, nscd may show an improvement;  the higher the volume, of course, the more dramatic the improvement.

The caveat there was to be aware that you were on a nscd enabled host and making liberal use of "nscd -i" to flush the proper cache when you were getting data that was inconsistent with what you were expecting due to a change that just happened and the old data had not expired from the cache yet.  This situation is the one that I most commonly hear expletives uttered at nscd. :)


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