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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

DNS lookup

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

phraseCommon term

In software engineering, DNS lookup means: The process of asking the Domain Name System to translate a domain name into an IP address or related record.

In Turkish: DNS sorgusu

How it is used

Common in networking, API calls, and service troubleshooting. Slow or failing DNS lookups can delay requests before any application code runs.

Example sentences

  1. The payment client timed out before connecting, and the incident report traced the delay to a slow DNS lookup in the container network.

    Here the term refers to the name-resolution step that happens before connection, so network delay appears before the remote service is reached.

  2. When we changed the endpoint hostname, a failed DNS lookup revealed that the staging environment still pointed to an old internal resolver.

    In this example, the lookup failure is evidence that the environment cannot resolve the new hostname with its current DNS configuration.

Common collocations

  • perform a DNS lookup
  • DNS lookup failure
  • DNS lookup time
  • reverse DNS lookup
  • APIShort for application programming interface: a set of rules that lets one program ask another program for data or actions in a fixed, documented way.
  • endpointA specific URL of an API that accepts requests for one kind of action, such as GET /users to list users or POST /orders to create an order.

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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