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The Beauty Of Having A Pi-hole · Den Delimarsky (den.dev)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 43 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Misleading statement. It doesn't block "traffic", it blocks DNS requests... you don't know how much traffic this corresponds to.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year 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 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.

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Of course, because ads have zero bandwidth. /s

    Are you an idiot?

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    As per the article

    on my own network a whopping 66.6% of all traffic is blocked

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm not sure whether it makes sense trying to discuss with you but let's try...

    You couldn't know how much traffic you saved because you didn't load the ad. The ad could be 1KB, 1MB or 1GB, but because you didn't load it you wouldn't know it's size. Without knowing it's size, you wouldn't be able to calculate the savings.

    As mentioned somewhere is in the thread you would have to directly compare two machines visiting the same pages and even then it's probably only approximate because both machines might get served different ads.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    I’ve compared average monthly bandwidth before and after implementation of dns based ad blocking and it has reduced my usage from anywhere from 33% to 45%.

    They have been implying that ad blocking only saves the dns request, which is the most ridiculous ignorant claim I’ve ever seen.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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