You can easily find out. 2 machines (even virtual machines) one set it’s DNS to the PiHole, one not.
Both hit the same sites in the same order. Compare network traffic.
Comment on The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den Delimarsky
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 week agoMisleading statement. It doesn’t block “traffic”, it blocks DNS requests… you don’t know how much traffic this corresponds to.
DScratch@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 week ago
That’s only for a single case comparison. You can’t draw statistically meaningful conclusions about what percentage of traffic the pihole has blocked over a longer period of time.
xavier666@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 week ago
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.
mac@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 week ago
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.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
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%.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 1 week ago
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 <img> tag pointing to an ad domain that I know is blocked on uBlock as well as on the pihole. Like so:
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.comand blocked it. My browser showed a broken image.rusticus@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Of course, because ads have zero bandwidth. /s
Are you an idiot?
xavier666@lemm.ee 1 week ago
As per the article
I stated it’s actually 66.6% DNS requests being blocked, not the raw bandwidth utilization. Raw bandwidth savings (by not downloading the non-zero ads) would be much lesser.
Can’t we be nicer on the internet?
rusticus@lemm.ee 1 week ago
No, raw bandwidth savings would likely be very significant. You do realize that for many webpages the ads are most of the bandwidth? On my network (I have capped internet so this is important) if I run dns ad blocking my total bandwidth is 40% less.