How to enable the Name Service cache Daemon (NSCD)

Question

How do you enable NSCD to improve the performance of the hostname, password, name and group lookup which is frequently being done by IBM Rational ClearCase?

Cause

By enabling the Name Service cache Daemon (NSCD) of the operating system, a significant performance improvement can be achieved when using naming services like DNS, NIS, NIS+, LDAP.

Answer

Benefit of name service cache daemon (NSCD) for ClearCase

Example:

WithoutNSCD:

[user@host]$ time cleartool co -nc "/var/tmp/file"
Checked out "/var/tmp/file" from version "/main/10".
real    0m3.355s
user    0m0.020s
sys     0m0.018s

With NSCD

[user@host]$ time cleartool co -nc "/var/tmp/file"
Checked out "/var/tmp/file" from version "/main/11".
real    0m0.556s
user    0m0.021s
sys     0m0.016s

Enabling NSCD

Solaris:
/etc/init.d/nscd start

Linux
service nscd start

AIX:
startsrc -s netcd

Note: In addition to having nscd started it is mandatory to be sure this service will be started after a reboot. For instance on Red Hat and SuSE you can run:

chkconfig nscd  on

For more details on how to configure and or enable NSCD refer to your respective operating system vendor's manpage.

Note that this service is not yet available on HP-UX platforms.