Hello and thank you for curl,
I noticed the same behaviour.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1044666
nss has code that finds out how expensive the access system call is for non-existant files in the given directory, returning the number of operations done in 33 ms. curl on RHEL6 is built with nss, so if you have a host that makes a lot of HTTPS connections/requests it can result in a significant increase in the dentry_cache and slab size.

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** [bugs:#1246] curl + nss seaches ._dOeSnotExist_ .[0-9]\{10\}.db files in /etc/pki/nssdb/**
**Status:** closed-invalid
**Labels:** nss https 
**Created:** Fri Jun 14, 2013 12:53 AM UTC by Antony Lem
**Last Updated:** Fri Jun 21, 2013 01:43 PM UTC
**Owner:** Daniel Stenberg
I noticed strange behavior of curl + nss when I tried to connect with https.
During the connection strace showed me follows 
access("/etc/pki/nssdb/._dOeSnotExist_1012323634.db", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/etc/pki/nssdb/._dOeSnotExist_1012323635.db", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
access("/etc/pki/nssdb/._dOeSnotExist_1012323636.db", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
There was 645 such string and it happened every time I started connection.I confused why curl is searching such unusual files.
OS:CentOS release 6.4 (Final)
curl 7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.13.6.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap ldaps http file https ftps scp sftp 
Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz
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