The pcscd daemon is used to manage connections to PC and SC smart card (formally PCMCIA) readers. Although pcscd is usually a low priority task, it can often use more CPU than any other daemon. This additional background noise can lead to higher pre-emption costs to realtime tasks and other undesirable impacts on determinism.
pcscd Daemon
Check the status of the pcscd daemon
# service pcscd status
pcscd (pid PID) is running...
If the pcscd daemon is running, stop it using the service command.
# service pcscd stop Stopping PC/SC smart card daemon (pcscd): [ OK ]
Use chkconfig to ensure that pcscd does not restart on boot.
# chkconfig pcscd off