this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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There are lots of reasons to use really low TTLs, but most are a temporary need. Most of the times I had to set low TTLs for records were for hardware migration projects where services were getting new IP addresses. But in a well managed shop this should always be temporary. The TTL would be set low the day before the change, then set back to a normal value the day after the change. I feel the author is correct in that permanently setting low TTLs just covers up a lack of proper planning and change management.
The only thing off the top of my head that I can think absolutely requires a permanently low TTL is DNS based global load balancing for high uptime applications. But I'm sure there are other uses. I agree that the vast majority of things do not need a low TTL on their DNS record.
So the options are to herd a million cats, or to set low TTLs? Hmmm ...
I have a reasonably latent connection and using pihole and an anycast upstream resolver is noticeably slow. It falls out of pihole cache so freaking fast with these low TTL. I have set up unbound with aggressive caching prefetch and if I recall correctly pihole has a toggle to serve expired. Serving expired in unbound, before pihole, breaks stuff that rotates IP fast.