[bustling-noose]

The quality of dns always makes or breaks your internet experience. Personally at home unbound on opnsense with some blocking list has always worked really well for me. Openwrt with pihole also works fine. But the moment I have to use some recursive dns like this, I tend to not enjoy the experience.

[udev4096]

It really depends. Cloudflare, quad9 or whatever upstream DNS probably has huge cache which makes resolving the queries quite fast. Although, local caching, like with unbound, is still going to be a lot better than any upstream resolver

[SparkyMcUnicorn]

opnsense + ctrld[0] + unbound works great and automatically upgrades upstream requests to DoH (etc.)

Was using NextDNS for a while, but stability and performance was a common issue. I like the idea of something like pihole, but ControlD is good, works anywhere, and is easy to manage.

[0] https://github.com/Control-D-Inc/ctrld/wiki/pfSense-and-OPNs...

[eudhxhdhsb32]

Are you just referring to ads not being blocked?

A regular dns like quad9 + ublock origin on Firefox has been a consistently great experience for me.

[bayindirh]

Probably the responsiveness of things. Firefox is very sensitive to DNS roundtrip time during daily use. A faster response time provides much better experience with it.

I guess that ~25% of "Firefox is slow" myth is coming from slow DNS response, if not higher.

[eudhxhdhsb32]

That makes sense. Do you know the reason for Firefox being more sensitive? Is their DNS prefetching not as effective?

[bayindirh]

I honestly have no idea. I observe it all the time, and note repeatedly everywhere when the discussion comes up, but never had the time to dig into the code and see how that all works.

[buyucu]

does PiHole cache dns queries and deliver them faster?

[woleium]

yes it caches, but it may not deliver them faster, depending on how good your previous dns service was and how good your hardware is.

[buyucu]

just checked my pihole logs and almost all entries are answered by local cache. this is great.