The goal is to perform frequent periodic calls to check the health of OpenLDAP using anonymous bind.
Someone at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16077473/ldap-bind-vs-search suggested that a ldapcompare would perform better than a ldapsearch because "there is only a single response per entry (a compare result) rather than two (a search result entry and a search result done)".
This explanation makes sense but it would be really great to hear the opinion of an expert on this, thank you very much :)