I disagree, there are too many variables and ultimately the end user would be th one that knows best. The proper solution isn’t having the library or application dev, who has no idea what kind of network connection the user is running, the type of dns server (caching or not, lan or remote, etc) or the name servers of the target domain and their performance or availability. This is all really the domain of the sysadmin.

The solution is to make it a properly non-blocking api.