nscd — name service cache daemon
nscd is a
daemon that provides a cache for the most common name service
requests. The default configuration file, /etc/nscd.conf, determines the behavior of
the cache daemon. See nscd.conf(5).
nscd provides caching for accesses of the passwd(5), group(5), hosts(5) services(5) and netgroup databases through standard libc interfaces, such as getpwnam(3), getpwuid(3), getgrnam(3), getgrgid(3), gethostbyname(3), and others.
There are two caches for each database: a positive one for items found, and a negative one for items not found. Each cache has a separate TTL (time-to-live) period for its data. Note that the shadow file is specifically not cached. getspnam(3) calls remain uncached as a result.
The daemon will try to watch for changes in configuration
files appropriate for each database (e.g., /etc/passwd for the passwd database or
/etc/hosts and /etc/resolv.conf for the hosts database), and flush
the cache when these are changed. However, this will happen
only after a short delay (unless the inotify(7) mechanism is
available and glibc 2.9 or later is available), and this
auto-detection does not cover configuration files required by
nonstandard NSS modules, if any are specified in /etc/nsswitch.conf. In that case, you need
to run the following command after changing the configuration
file of the database so that nscd invalidates its
cache:
$ nscd −i<database>