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I notice that the combination of Brave browser and a pi-hole slowed down several pages such that I have to wait 20-30 seconds before the page is loaded and usable.

I tried the following to identify the issue:

  • Used Safari and pi-hole DNS to visit the offending page: no slowdown
  • Used Brave without pi-hole DNS (by setting the upstream DNS directly on my client) to visit the offending page: no slowdown
  • Used Brave with "shields down" and with pi-hole DNS to visit the offending page: slow loading

So only when I combined Brave (with or without shields) with the pi-hole DNS I got the slowdown.

I tried the suggested solution of setting up firewall rules on the raspberry, unfortunately this did not change anything.

Saaru Lindestøkke
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1 Answers1

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I found that the FTLDNS blocking mode was the source of this issue. By default it is set to NULL, returning the unspecified address 0.0.0.0 for blocked queries.

Apparently the Brave browser does not like it (for some pages?). Setting the blocking mode to NXDOMAIN speeds up the loading time tremendously (from 20-30 seconds to maximum 1 second).

Saaru Lindestøkke
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