[squid-users] round robin DNS and the occassional failing IP.

I am having trouble on two machines on two completely different networks,
both using squid -- for months now, a reasonably portion of the time,
squid fails to get through to google.com.au for the first minute. A
tcpdump revealed that it was failing when trying to contact the same
72.14.203.104 host. After a minute, squid would try the next host in the
cached DNS result. Since both machines have 4 addresses in their cached
result of google.com.au, and both included 72.14.203.104, one in 4
searches would take a minute to get a result.

In the event that a hostname resolves to n>1 IPs, and one or more of them
m<=n-1 are timing out (or connection refused and certain other error
conditions), I think squid should cache this result for a configurable
time (of the order of days or until a restart, or until DNS has
refreshed its list of IPs for that host), and then not try that IP
again until it has exhausted its supply of IPs corresponding to this name.

Have I perhaps missed this setting, or am misunderstanding something that
would make this not work?

-- 
Tim Connors