TTL

acronym

networking

Stands for: Time To Live

A counter that limits how long data lives or how far a packet may travel before being discarded.

In DNS, TTL is how many seconds a record may be cached before it must be looked up again; in IP, it is the hop limit that stops a lost packet from circling forever. Same name, two jobs, both about bounding lifetime.

Also known as: ttl, time to live, hop limit

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