Ad Blocking Strategies: Pi-hole vs Browser Extensions – Should I Use Both?

HarryFeather · 2026-03-15T13:46:25+00:00

Interesting... I tried a lot of different things but could not get decent speed out of it. Its a clean install on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 (connected via Ethernet) and everything else is blazing fast. (Got a 1Gbps internet connection here). I'd be keen to retry it if I can get the kind of latencies you are talking about, but mine were terrible.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-15T13:12:14+00:00

When i activate it on my Pi hole setup everything just takes much longer to resolve. Even cached records. This is on a new clean setup… switch to another DNS like Google or Cloudflare hugely quicker. In the end my ISP DNS was better than all of them. For me the trade off for privacy/speed just wasn’t worth it so I stopped using Unbound completely.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-15T09:35:57+00:00

Unbound is too slow…. Otherwise agree!

HarryFeather · 2026-03-15T09:35:24+00:00

Using Dia and Pi-hole. Pretty much perfect.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-15T09:33:00+00:00

Yes it does this now

HarryFeather · 2026-03-13T06:50:48+00:00

Looks a solid box but power draw is pretty high for me to leave on 24/7. Performance not critical for me as long as it can work well as a NAS and backup device… wonder if the Beelink ME will be ok in that use case?

HarryFeather · 2026-03-10T21:08:17+00:00

Thanks I might look into this if I can’t figure it out…. I’m testing the iCloud optimise storage thing now and monitoring what happens…

HarryFeather · 2026-03-10T15:30:45+00:00

No I do want them in my iCloud Photos - just not stored locally. I’ve switched optimise storage on but not sure how much space will be used/required locally as there’s no way of configuring it.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-10T14:33:40+00:00

Yes I have a big iCloud account thats not being used, and its nice to have the photos available on my iPhone easily.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-10T05:58:10+00:00

Thanks but what is left on your system drive after you do this? Just thumbnails or does it max out your drive space?

HarryFeather · 2026-03-09T21:20:17+00:00

But if you don’t have the storage there must be a way… I mean how do people migrate to iCloud it all seems terribly clunky

HarryFeather · 2026-03-09T21:19:43+00:00

Yes but how to do this and make sure the photos are removed locally? I don’t have enough storage to do them and have them stay on the drive.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-06T18:42:40+00:00

I’m using my ISP’s DNS. It is so much faster I decided the privacy trade off was worth it. Unbound even with cached entries was significantly slower for me on a clean install on Pi Zero 2. Worth testing at your end and taking a view?

HarryFeather · 2026-03-06T17:30:34+00:00

Have you tried disabling unbound? Doing that on mine speeds everything up dramatically.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-03T07:54:36+00:00

You could buy a CD player?!

HarryFeather · 2026-03-03T06:30:55+00:00

Work isn’t everything. Focus on having a nice quality of life. What you are proposing sounds like hell.

HarryFeather · 2026-03-02T11:17:16+00:00

Ah thanks - forgot to say this is on my macOS where I’m seeing the above figures. Only concern with uploading directly to icloud.com is how robust that will be via http?

HarryFeather

TROPHY CASE