Net::DNS is a better tool if resolving is causing a lot of problems. It allows better user control over how the resolver works.

If you're an admin on a UNIX-type system, you can tweak your resolver to make it work better. The defaults are really lax and can cause problems like you have encountered. As a bonus, this will speed up everything on the system that uses DNS.

For Linux, BSD, and the like, /etc/resolv.conf is used to control the behaviour of the resolver. There are some parameters such as timeout which can speed things up for failed results, and you can use more than one DNS server using the rotate option.

More details at: man resolv.conf