> This is surprising --- I'd expect a DNS lookup failure to be much faster than a default connection timeout which comes after a successful DNS lookup. Unlike

> This is surprising --- I'd expect a DNS lookup failure to be much faster than a default connection timeout which comes after a successful DNS lookup. Unlike regular DNS where you're asking a single server at a single IP for a yes/no answer, mDNS is multicast, so no single server can authoritatively say no†. You can only detect that there are no records when the lookup times out because no servers have responded. † Not technically true, a device can say no if it knows it owns that name.