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I've been told to assume it takes as long as 48 hours for a DNS change to propagate throughout the entire Internet, because some DNS servers cache their entries for longer than my TTL.

However, for years and across ISPs and domains, every time I've made a DNS change I see the effects within a couple of hours.

Is it still true that I need to assume a full two days for everyone to see my changes?

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    In particular, web crawlers tend to cache DNS for a very long time. I've seen the Baidu spider still hitting the old address three weeks after the TTL expired. I've never seen the Googlebot take more than a couple of days but that's on TTLs of 15 minutes.
    – Ladadadada
    Apr 11, 2012 at 21:57
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    DNS doesn't propagate. There are issues relating to caching and TTL but that's not propagation. Apr 11, 2012 at 23:02
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    They DO. There are issues related to caching and the common word for it is propagation. ;)
    – Sandman4
    Apr 12, 2012 at 14:58

3 Answers 3

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It takes until the last cache holding the old data expires and that server fetches the new data.

You have limited control over that with the TTL value on the records, but there are ISPs who disregard cache times, cache everything for the SOA expire or refresh time, assign their own arbitrary value (AOL used to be famous for caching everything for 1 day regardless of any other directives), and probably a few broken implementations that always re-query the data.

Bottom line: It takes as long as it takes.
48 hours is a good rule of thumb that has served the internet well.

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  • AOL is no longer a major ISP. Is disregarding TTL in widespread practice by current network operators?
    – spiffytech
    Apr 13, 2012 at 19:54
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    You'd be surprised how many people in the world still use dial-up ISPs. In any case, blatantly violating the DNS RFCs by ignoring TTLs is still common enough that I take it into account when making DNS changes and decommissioning old services. I always suggest to others that they do the same, in the spirit of "Don't Break The Internet (even if the people it would break for are idiots)".
    – voretaq7
    Apr 13, 2012 at 19:59
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Yes, and in some cases it can be much longer.

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I think it's a 80/20 problem. Don't spend 80% of your energy trying to figure out how 20% of Internet users will get to your site. Stick to RFCs and you've done your job. The rest is beyond your control anyway.

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