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by tbirrell 2571 days ago
I keep meaning to set one up one of these days. Does anyone know what effect a Pi-hole has on internet speed? I play a few games where latency is a big deal, and don't really want to artificially throttle my internet.
4 comments

It actually has a positive impact on the Internet speed! Your DNS results are cached locally so the latency is very low, plus blocking ads at the DNS level means you're not even downloading the ad creatives, resulting in a higher speed as well.
It shouldn't have any impact on internet speed as it only comes into the picture for DNS requests. It doesn't sit in line with your internet traffic.
It helps a great deal for web browsing. Having a DNS cache on LAN at 1ms reach speeds up browsing noticeably.
Echoing other posters. I had the same concern about throttling internet, but realized that your traffic doesn't flow through the pi-hole, just DNS requests (and those are cached). I've noticed no throttling.
Mine is both the DNS resolver and the DHCP server, due to limitations on my router, and I haven't noticed any big problems with latency/speed.