This object sets the minimum number of seconds the Distributed Director retains cached request and response information for DNS or HTTP queries, and has no effect if caching is disabled. A longer cache time reduces recomputation load but increases the window during which a since-failed server could still be handed out to new clients from a stale cache entry, so an admin tunes this to balance performance against how quickly server-health changes should be reflected. An admin managing servers that fail relatively often might shorten this value to a few seconds so cached decisions expire quickly enough to avoid routing clients to a server that just went down.