This is the Name Service Cache Daemon. It takes care of group and password lookups for running programs and then caches the lookup results for the next query for services that can experience slowness in picking up changes such as NIS or LDAP. If you’re running these services, you may want to run nscd.
This daemon can cache the data for name services, /etc/hosts, DNS, NIS, NIS+ or so. This is only for local users on the machine, because the cache is realized by wrapping the functions in glibc, remote user can never use this cache. It takes a time to change the cache even when the original DNS data is changed, therefore be careful to use this daemon.
Usage: /etc/init.d/nscd {start|stop|status|restart|reload|condrestart}
/etc/nscd.conf