Comment by cnst

Source?

DNS errors are actually still cached; it's something that has been debunked by DJB like a couple of decades ago, give or take:

http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/third-party.html

> RFC 2182 claims that DNS failures are not cached; that claim is false.

Here are some more recent details and the fuller explanation:

https://serverfault.com/a/824873

Note that FB.com currently expires its records in 300 seconds, which is 5 minutes.

PowerDNS (used by ordns.he.net) caches servfail for 60s by default — packetcache-servfail-ttl — which isn't very far from the 5min that you get when things aren't failing.

Personally, I do agree with DJB — I think it's a better user experience to get a DNS resolution error right away, than having to wait many minutes for the TCP timeout to occur when the host is down anyways.