[bigiain]

AWS Route53 defaults to 300 seconds (which is probably why so many articles see that as the median ttl), and I've never encountered problems leaving that at the default. I suspect the performance problems are real if you're running your own dns servers - but if you're piggybacking on something like AWS I seriously doubt you'll see issues (apart from monthly bills, if you suddenly go viral to the moon...)

"Back in the day", Internet Explorer was a problem with TTLs, from memory IE6 was when they stopped caching all dns lookups for 24hrs no matter what the til was, and IE6 still coached for 4hrs. (This was a drama for me back in the early 2000's when I was trying to do dns based load balancing...)

My opinion these days is don't try to go much below 1 minute if you want other peoples resolvers or software to honour your ttls, but I do see people using 1 sec ttls occasionally, so presumably if your application doesn't mind too much if not everybody h9onours your ttl - it's still worth doing for some people...