The main difference between (s)locate and find is the overall load it puts on a system. If you have an idle timewindow somewhere during the day/night, schedule slocate to reindex your system.

When someone wants to quickly locate a file, slocate will simply access this database and give you the result without much hassle, whereas find will actually start scanning your filesystems, generating lots of IO calls.

Thus IF you have a timewindow of say an hour or so, consider implementing slocate in your environment. If not, like in my case, find is the only - IO-intense - way of locating files.

(although of course find is way way way more powerfull than slocate)