The 2.5s value-cache + fewer calls only halved the slowness; the real cause was flaky WSL DNS (~5s on ~1 in 5 resolves) and urllib re-resolving on EVERY request. Cache successful DNS lookups process-wide (5min TTL) so each Alpaca host is resolved at most once per window. Measured: get_orders went from intermittent 5s spikes to a steady ~200ms. Opt out via ALPACA_DNS_CACHE=0. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>