Is there much performance difference in ad blocking options? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm currently using the blocklists included with unbound in opnsense on a mini PC and I have used pihole on a pi which now operates my 3d printers instead. I haven't tried any of the other network wide options. Has anyone made any blog posts or similar detailing performance testing of different options?

I have an 8 person household with each person having at least a phone and computer and probably some consoles or something. I haven't noticed any obvious differences but whitelisting seemingly can't be done in bulk efficiently with my current setup.

We are all going to be moving in the coming months so I am revisiting different aspects of the home network and trying to figure out what can be improved and if anything is irritating enough in it's current state to tolerate a potential performance loss.

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Most self hosted DNS level blocking will be very fast as it is really easy to keep the block list in RAM. I hosted Pi Hole on RPi 3 and an over provisioned VM (4 cores and 4GB of ram lol). The only difference I’ve noticed is whether or not the device is hardwired. When my RPi was hardwired into the network, there was no notable difference between the two.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Firstly, I absolutely agree you should be hardwiring any kind of infrastructure. But honestly, even over WiFi your main latency is going to come from the WAN hop to whatever upstream DNS you’ve configured.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This is more or less what I was hoping would be the case. I'll be pulling down some of the drywall to run Ethernet beween floors so I won't need to worry about wireless being slower at least. I figure I'll just try the other blocking options and go with the one I find most pleasant.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Performance is usually pretty similar. I use AdGuard Home (mostly for malware blocking) and it stores the cache in RAM, so the only thing that's potentially slow is the first lookup for a domain. That's going to be affected by the size of your block list, but it's likely that all these solutions use hashing to speed it up, meaning it won't slow down linearly. Once a domain is cached, serving it is very fast. The others work similarly.

AdGuard Home has an option to serve a stale cached record and refresh it in the background, meaning DNS lookups will practically always be served from RAM, except after you restart it when the RAM cache is empty.

I also like AdGuard Home because it supports DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS, and uses it by default. There's also a separate piece of software called AdGuardHome-Sync to keep the config in sync between multiple instances. I run two of them (one on a home server in Docker, and one on a Raspberry Pi in Docker) so I can take one down without breaking the internet for my wife.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I'll have to look in to that. I really need to look into redundancy for a lot of things actually.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Redundancy is really important when it effects other people, IMO. Personally I use 2 piholes kept in sync with gravity-sync.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

DNS is one of the easiest things to make redundant, since each server runs independently of the others, and clients automatically handle falling back to the other server in case one of them is down (modern OSes will send around half the queries to the primary server and half to the secondary, but they handle outages well too)

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
DNS	Domain Name Service/System
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS	HTTP over SSL
RPi	Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC	Single-Board Computer
SSL	Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
TLS	Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

All DNS blocking is going to be very fast, essentially no real added time.

this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024

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