PowerDNS implements a very simple but effective nameserver. Care has been taken not to overload remote servers in case of overly active clients.
This is implemented using the 'throttle'. This accounts all recent traffic and prevents queries that have been sent out recently from going out again.
There are three levels of throttling.
If a remote server indicates that it is lame for a zone, the exact question won't be repeated in the next 60 seconds.
After 4 ServFail responses in 60 seconds, the query gets throttled too.
5 timeouts in 20 seconds also lead to query suppression.