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 cacheing for accesses of the
passwd(5),
group(5),
and
hosts(5)
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.
