A system, method and article of manufacture for reducing latencies associated with cache coherence directory misses on external caches in a shared distributed memory data processing system. A cache coherence directory is evaluated for possible prefetching of a directory entry into a directory cache. A prefetch miss indicator is set if the prefetch evaluated results in a directory miss. The prefetch miss indicator is consulted during subsequent processing of a memory block request corresponding to the directory entry. An accelerated snoop response action is taken if the prefetch miss indicator is set. The latency of a second lookup into the cache coherence directory, which would otherwise be required, is thereby avoided.