Running ntlm_auth as a connection pool

[Arnab Roy]

   Hi All,
   So I took things apart today. I switched to using direct winbind on a
   test machine ...what a difference in performance you can't even compare
   the two method's performance.
   To check where such high cost of performance comes from I replaced ntlm
   auth with a simple shell script which just echoed back the NT key and
   another one directly calling the NTLM_AUTH and the results where same.
   So it seems like the cost of calling an external binary from inside the
   server is extremely high.
   So I went back to the friendly folks at samba and they kindly pointed
   me to the section of the code responsible for obtaining the winbindd
   path. I managed to recompile ntlm_auth and it works but it's pointless.
   The file in question in samba is under nsswitch/wb_common.c
   My question is does freeradius use the same code as samba for the
   client side communication. Can it be tweaked and compiled to behave
   similarly that would solve my problems for now.
   Any help is welcome.
   Many Thanks
   Arnab