Re-raising: Non-blocking DNS Lookup specifically on ESP8266 Arduino

Projects Networking, Protocols, and Devices
1

A little bit of an apology for re-posting this but I think my original post may have been too rambling so I have whittled it down to the bare question.

ESP8266 Arduino.

WiFi.hostByName usually returns in milliseconds successfully but sometimes takes several seconds and completes successfully or takes up to 8 seconds and returns without success.

My program comes to a complete halt while waiting for DNS lookup. That's OK for milliseconds but not OK for more than a second. I realize that there are parts of the network that are out of my control and I don't want my real-time activities to hang for more than a second because of a network glitch.

I know how to do non-blocking sockets but I do not know how to do non-blocking lookups.

Is there a non-blocking DNS lookup function, or a way to time-out a DNS lookup in a second or so, so my real-time activities can pick up again?

My current code fragment below.

IPAddress timeServerIP; // time.nist.gov NTP server address
const char* ntpServerName = "pool.ntp.org";
WiFi.hostByName(ntpServerName, timeServerIP);

2

There's a version of that method that allows to set a timeout:

int ESP8266WiFiGenericClass::hostByName(const char* aHostname, IPAddress& aResult, uint32_t timeout_ms);