Time in cache

[Kevin Darcy]

Eriberto wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I use Bind9 and I perceived the cache don't keep the information in
> memory at the time imposed by master server of the remote zone. Example:
>
> --------------------------
> # dig www.terra.com.br @ns1.terra.com.br
>
> ; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> www.terra.com.br @ns1.terra.com.br
>
> ...
>
> ;; ANSWER SECTION:
> www.terra.com.br.       7200    IN      A       200.176.3.142
>
> ...
> --------------------------
>
> I think this information must be kept in the local DNS cache by 7200
> seconds. However, if I call www.terra.com.br in the browser and I wait
> ten minutes and I try to access the URL again, the browser shows
> "searching www.terra.com.br". Why?
>
>   
The TTL specifies the *maximum* amount of time that the record can be 
considered valid in cache. There's nothing that says a caching resolver 
*must* used cached data for that amount of time. Caching resolvers are 
free to fetch new records any time they want, in fact resolvers aren't 
required to cache at all, in which case they'd need to fetch the data 
for every lookup.

Now, between your attempt to access www.terra.com.br in your browser, 
and the data in the master, there may have been several levels of 
caching -- your browser itself may cache, your OS may have a generic 
"name" cache which isn't necessarily specific to DNS, then you might 
have a local DNS resolver running, with its own cache, which then may be 
part of a forwarding chain of indeterminate length, each forwarder doing 
it's own caching as well. Any or all of these caching resolvers may 
choose to fetch the information anew. Why this would result in the 
"searching" message from your browsers, as you describe, I have no idea. 
What kind of latency do you have on your network connection? Caching is 
an *optimization*, it's not meant to compensate for latencies that cause 
ordinary DNS queries to time out.

                                                                         
                     - Kevin