Just to start off, I have basic knowledge when it comes to networking and DNS setup.
I had PiHole installed for over a year, ad blocking working fine but there was unexplained lag/slowness across the devices.
My internet is not bad, 350mbps 5G home (no other options available in my area).
For example:
-Videos on X (Twitter) and TikTok would take around 3 to 5 seconds to load and start playing. When switching to mobile carrier data it is loading instantly.
-Github pulls frequently fail even though the domain is whitelisted.
Recently I decided to change from PiHole to Adguard Home, it’s been over a week now and internet is much much faster. the above mentioned examples are not an happening anymore. overall browsing is also faster.
I don’t know what was causing the issue with PiHole but I thought I would share this experience in case someone else is having similar issues.
I would also be very interested to know any logical explanation to this experience.
Edit: Hosting is on Physical server running ProxMox, not raspberry pi.
DNS resolution takes so little bandwidth (network/memory/cpu) the only realistic answer is misconfuguration of some kind.
That a video from a site took longer to load probably isn’t a DNS issue, especially since your local DNS resolver keeps a cache of sites that have been resolved, and again, other than looking up the IP address, DNS has no other involvement with the network.
What you’re describing is like saying the phone book made my phone call not go through. A phone book is a directory service (they used to call them Directories), DNS works exactly the same way - find the name in the directory, get their numerical address.
The actual connection is another thing altogether.