US Patent 7698278 Method and system for caching directory services

A computing device includes a local directory service cache. The local directory service cache is a live database. The directory service cache is stored in a shared memory space. In certain embodiments of the invention, client processes needing directory services can directly access the local directory service cache via memory mapping. A caching program updates and maintains the database and obtains the needed data if a cache miss is encountered. Some socket communications between the client processes and the caching program may be used to update database entries, notify the caching program of cache misses, etc.