Editing Time to live (section)

{{Short description|Time limit of messages in network engineering}}
{{for|the film|Time to Live (film){{!}}''Time to Live'' (film)}}
{{Use American English|date = February 2019}}
'''Time to live''' ('''TTL''') or '''hop limit''' is a mechanism which limits the lifespan or lifetime of data in a computer or network. TTL may be implemented as a [[counter (digital)|counter]] or [[timestamp]] attached to or embedded in the data. Once the prescribed event count or timespan has elapsed, data is discarded or revalidated. In [[computer networking]], TTL prevents a data packet from circulating indefinitely. In [[computing]] applications, TTL is commonly used to improve the performance and manage the [[cache (computing)|caching]] of data.