Centos – How to flush local DNS cache in CentOS

The reason why you are missing the cache hits is that dig queries the DNS directly. You can try and see whether the cache works with the getent command:

getent hosts host.example.com

Running a separate caching DNS is a good idea, but you should consider running it on the network level if possible. If each host cache the data separately they will still run multiple queries for the same hosts. Single cache works around this problem.

Nscd itself is a caching daemon for NSS functions. So the focus is a bit different than native caching nameservers. So if you just want a caching nameserver, use something else than nscd. If instead you wish to cache things like shared usernames and hostdata outside of the normal DNS system, go for nscd.

And for the record, I've grown quite fond of powerdns resolver (pdns-resolver).

What part of your webserver is even doing DNS lookups? Most webserver configurations explicitly disable reverse DNS lookup of each incoming user, for speed (because DNS is slow in general).

As Patrick notes, nscd is doing the right thing and respecting the positive TTL values. Yes, you could override it (unbound would let you do this easily, just modify server.cache-min-ttl, has warnings about increasing it beyond 1 hour for the same reasons). HOWEVER, your queries are probably mostly rDNS, which will tend to have longer TTLs in general.

Additionally, since your maximum number of cached values is so low, I'd like to note that you're hardly getting any traffic.

If you do care about where you users repeat from that often, I'd suggest logging it outside nscd, and not worrying about it anymore.

Edit (2013/12//09): nscd -g hosts stats from dev.gentoo.org (no blocks in comments):

nscd configuration:
 4h  8m 43s  server runtime
hosts cache:
        yes  cache is enabled
         no  cache is persistent
         no  cache is shared
        422  suggested size
    1108744  total data pool size
     966632  used data pool size
        600  seconds time to live for positive entries
         20  seconds time to live for negative entries
      67878  cache hits on positive entries
       2479  cache hits on negative entries
       9464  cache misses on positive entries
       4276  cache misses on negative entries
         83% cache hit rate
       6951  current number of cached values
       7641  maximum number of cached values
         33  maximum chain length searched
          1  number of delays on rdlock
          0  number of delays on wrlock
          0  memory allocations failed
        yes  check /etc/hosts for changes