I wish there was a positive answer.
Even with JSSE and JNDI performance is horrible when creating new connections. One thing that I've liked about some recent versions of servers and at least the latest JNDI in
Java 1.4.1 (not sure if JLDAP has it yet) is the StartTLS operation. This at least offers the option of only upgrading the session to SSL when it is really needed.
Clayton