I’m currently using the blocklists included with unbound in opnsense on a mini PC and I have used pihole on a pi which now operates my 3d printers instead. I haven’t tried any of the other network wide options. Has anyone made any blog posts or similar detailing performance testing of different options?
I have an 8 person household with each person having at least a phone and computer and probably some consoles or something. I haven’t noticed any obvious differences but whitelisting seemingly can’t be done in bulk efficiently with my current setup.
We are all going to be moving in the coming months so I am revisiting different aspects of the home network and trying to figure out what can be improved and if anything is irritating enough in it’s current state to tolerate a potential performance loss.
Why not benchmark it yourself and find out?
I’m not sure how but if nobody has already done it I’ll probably try to figure it out. There are night shifters in the household so I would probably need additional hardware and run a separate testing network since any downtime at all will get the complaining going.
You should be able to host another one in parallel with whatever you’re doing now and run some tests based on your typical use cases. Set the client to use that specific one for DNS.
Honestly, though, I doubt you’ll see much difference. Clients make a DNS request and cache it, so it’s not like it’ll affect download speeds. Unless DNS responses are delayed by human-observable amounts (half second, whole seconds, or more) then a millisecond or two in either direction isn’t going to make a noticeable difference.