phrasing
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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I'm reasonably certain the name was intentional because of the way it could be phrased.
66.6% of all traffic is blocked with no functional impact on anything that I do
Okay. I’m convinced.
Misleading statement. It doesn't block "traffic", it blocks DNS requests... you don't know how much traffic this corresponds to.
Correct. The payload of DNS requests is tiny compared to, say requesting a webpage. So there might not be a huge decrease of bandwidth usage reduction. However, having 66.6% less DNS requests is still a win. The router/gateway doesn't have to work that hard because of the dropped requests.
It isn't so much about the payload of the DNS requests, but about the content that would have been loaded if the DNS request hadn't been blocked.
If you load a page that has 100kB of useful information, but 1MB of banner ads and trackers ... you've blocked a lot more than 66%. But if you block 1MB of banner ads on a page that hosts a 200MB video, you've blocked a lot less.
Also a 66% blocked percentage seems very high. I have installed pihole on 2 networks, and I'm seeing 1.7% on my own network, but I do run uBlock on almost everything which catches most stuff before it reaches the pihole, and 25% on the other network.
From my understanding, uBlock doesn’t have any impact on a pihole. Any browser-based ad blocker will work by detecting the ads after the DNS requests have been made. A properly functioning pihole would intercept the ads before the ad blocker. 1.7% seems suspiciously low; My primary pihole averages anywhere from 25-50%, depending on usage.
Your understanding is not correct. For page elements, uBlock prevents the domain from even trying to load, so no DNS request is ever made. Only if you go directly to an ad domain from the url bar (who does that?), does a DNS request get made.
For example, on my own webserver, I created a simple static html file with an tag pointing to an ad domain that I know is blocked on uBlock as well as on the pihole. Like so:
<html>
adblock test
<img src="https://track.adtrue.com/some/bannerad.png"></img>
</html>
Loading that page, uBlock showed 1 blocked ad on that page, pihole only logged a DNS request to my webserver, not to track.adtrue.com.
Once I turned off uBlock in the browser and reloaded the page, pihole did log the request to track.adtrue.com and blocked it. My browser showed a broken image.
I run a handful of instances across different networks, 1.7% is suspiciously low, you should make sure you've got the right lists. I like HageZi's
I use firebog's ticked lists, from what I can tell from the logs ad domains are blocked just fine.
But as I said, I have ublock origin on all my browsers which already catches most ads before they reach pihole, and I don't use mobile a lot when I'm at home. Oh, and I also use Linux, so no Microsoft telemetry to block either.
1.7% makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah no ublock origin really won't block all that many, the chattiest DNS comes from apps and smart devices, windows and mac laptops etc.
I also run ublock on all of my browsers
Yeah no ublock origin really won’t block all that many
Meh, it's fairly easy to check this you know. If I turn off uBlock, my pihole logs do turn red. If it's left on, pihole logs stay mostly green, with nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary getting through.
the chattiest DNS comes from apps and smart devices, windows and mac laptops etc.
I don't have many of those. My work laptop is windows but it connects through a VPN only, and I have my smartphone that I barely use at home.
I was averaging ~1-2% blocked using the firebog and a few other lists, I also have ublock origin on everything I can. Added hagezi's 'pro plus' list last month and it's up to 39% blocked.
Don't fall for the trap that they recommend an expensive Pi 5: I am running Pi-hole on a Pi 2 but you can basically run this on obsolete hardware, whether that's a Pi or a PC/laptop
I'm running Pi-hole and Pi-VPN on a Zero W (using a Geekworm case w/RJ45). It's not very taxing at all.
I also run two other Pi-hole instances in my server cluster (one in Docker and one in an LXC container). Mostly just for uptime reasons, so I can take any one of them down at any time to perform maintenance and/or upgrade.
You may even be able to run it on a NAS. My NAS supports docker, which means I can run a pihole on it. I have a Pi 3b as my dedicated primary, but my NAS runs as a backup.
Can confirm. I have 10 year old pi2 that is dedicated to pi hole and even that is not utilizing all of its 1gb of memory
I run mine on a PI 0. Also use it as a samba disk partition for transferring files.
No performance impacts on regular browsing? I never dared to run a DNS on a wifi only device. Or are you using some kind of Ethernet over USB thing?
I figured the latency would be no greater then going out to default dns, maybe a bit less.
I’m running mine on a pi 0. Very slight latency difference - like 2-3ms. Totally worth it for blocking 30% of garbage on average. The decrease in time it takes to load anything more than makes up for the latency. We have over 20 devices on wifi. Both my son and I play online games and the only time I blame lag is when I suck lol.
I use adguard home in conjunction with NextDNS.
I find adguard a little better in the UI department. Have it in a docker container so it's a set and forget.
Raspberry Pi 1b > DietPi > Pi-hole > Unbound <3
I’m running mine in Alpine.
I never hear anyone else talk about dietpi, I install that more than raspbian
DietPi looks interesting, especially for a 0W and my older B+ model that's just hanging around doing nothing...
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