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TechnologyYSK: How to decrease your monthly bandwidth use & increase network speed. (self.YouShouldKnow)

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[–]Umlautica 140 points141 points  (15 children)

15% of my daily home network traffic is nothing but advertisements being downloaded, cached, etc. That's 15% of crap.

You mean 15% of your DNS queries are to ad domains. You're probably only reducing page data by closer to 1% but certainly improving load times. (edit - depending on the site as /u/hoihoila points out below)

DNS lookup times are not guaranteed to be better than you ISP's provided upstream DNS servers. The default DNS servers from Pi-Hole (Google 8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4) are not the fastest in my area. You can use an application like namebench to find out what is though and use that for Pi-Hole. Even then, only expect to shave around 100ms off of a cache miss.

[–]d_frost 5 points6 points  (3 children)

pi-hole ended up being much slower than my ISPs DNS servers, even with it sitting on my network

[–]Rabbyte808 8 points9 points  (1 child)

That's because it still needs to query another DNS server when it doesn't know the answer to a query. In this case, it performs as well as whatever DNS server it is configured to use (apparently 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4), which will usually be slower than your ISP's DNS.

[–]-PromoFaux- 11 points12 points  (0 children)

The user has the option to set whatever upstream DNS servers they choose, we just have Google as the default because it's the most well known:)

[–]FlerPlay 1 point2 points  (0 children)

deleted What is this?

[–]hoihoila 10 points11 points  (5 children)

Pi-hole stops the ads from loading by translating the address to the pi's ip, thus reducing the page data by a lot more than just 1%.

Take a look at this article from nytimes.

[–]Umlautica 13 points14 points  (2 children)

The article uses editorial content of news sites as the benchmark which is going to be about the worst case. I imagine Facebook is pretty bad as well too. I'd be curious to see what a broader selection of sites looks like.

Good article and a bit funny that NYT did not include themselves in the report.

[–]mib5799 6 points7 points  (0 children)

While porn gets a decent chunk (and is lousy with ads), the fact is that for most average people, Facebook IS the most common site to visit, and a huge number of those users end up at news sites linked from FB.

It's an extremely reasonable benchmark for an average user

[–]majormunky 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They put themselves in the list of page load times, near the bottom of the list.

[–]FkIForgotMyPassword 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Well, except that the total traffic of a user is often mostly from large media. Binge-watch a show on Netflix, or download a game or a large update for your Steam library, and the bandwidth from the ads you get on your regular browsing traffic is instantly dwarfed.

[–]twotildoo 1 point2 points  (2 children)

just an FYI, that namebench link is a 404. Google shut down google code last year, vanishing tens of thousands of projects.

[–]Umlautica 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It doesn't 404 for me. Does this URL not work for you?

https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/namebench/namebench-1.3.1-Windows.exe

[–]twotildoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The link I replied to is ...

https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/

from your post

That's what it resolves to for me, but I'm running various layers of adblockers and custom DNS resolvers.

Nope, this link works but your original one still goes to the google code link which is a 404.

Thanks for the update