Comment 5 for bug 616719

Yes. Based on a few tests done by hand on OpenSUSE, nscd speeds up the process a lot:
When nscd is running I get a response within 100 mSec in average, sometimes down to 8 mSec and maximum 2.2 seconds. If I stop nscd, answer times ranges between 400 mSec and 2 seconds - the average around 800 mSec.
Requesting a new uid (not cached) with each request does not seem to add much to these figures.

I only did 4 tests on Ubuntu 2 with nscd running - and the same 2 tests without nscd.
With nscd: 2 minutes 51sec., and 16 minutes
and the same to tests without nscd: 3 minutes, and 14 minutes.
The differences is negligible and most likely due to other load on the ldap server I think.