dig Query time

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 01:27:40PM -0700,
 Ed Sawicki <ed at alcpress.com> wrote 
 a message of 23 lines which said:

> The server doesn't respond to the first query.  Five seconds later,
> dig tries again and gets an answer this time. It displays "145 msec"
> instead of telling me that the query failed or that the total query
> time was 5 seconds plus.

Good analysis, IMHO. 5 seconds is the default timeout of the resolver,
you can probably change it with the:

options timeout:N

of resolv.conf

> I guess this is normal behavior for dig. Any comments?

You may use echoping instead (http://echoping.sourceforge.net/) whose
DNS plugin will tell you that the elapsed time was 5 seconds. Not that
I'm happy with this behavior, instead (see
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1694858&group_id=4581&atid=354581
for a discussion).