nscd throttling when high ldap use occurs

[Cliff Friedel <cliff@wrkcs.net>]

Hi all.  I realize that this isn't really an LDAP problem, but I am
wondering if anyone has seen this.  First a little background, we have
integrated LDAP into our SuSE Linux 6.4 machines to handle lookups for 
username and password lookups for our clients.  What we are seeing is nscd
throttling and causing all network connections to hang on our
machine.  This seems to happen when we take a large amount of ldap
requests on our machine (due to mail requests and deliveries, logins,
etc).  My questions are:  How much of a performance hit on lookups can we
expect if we turn off nscd and if we do not turn off nscd, what would be
recommended changes in nscd.conf.  We have already considered extending
the cache time, but I am thinking that this may cause problems if people
change their passwords.  Thanks in advance for your help.

Cliff Friedel