Blocklist vs regex preference?

[DL6ER]

@js290

which one does pihole use preferentially

The priority is:

1. Exact Whitelist
2. Regex Whitelist
3. Exact Blacklist
4. Blocklist domains (AKA gravity)
5. Regex Blacklist

If a domain is found anywhere from top to bottom, FTL skips the rest of the tests.

@js290

I’m not sure if bulk importing a regex list that may overlap with Domains on Blocklist will cause pihole performance to suffer if regex is preferred over the blocklist?

Yes. The drawback of regex is that any regex filter could match any domain. Hence, we have to loop over all enabled regex filters for each domain that is not either whitelisted or exactly blocked before.

The performance impact of a very large amount of regex filters can be quite hefty on low-end devices like Pi Zero. In contrast, the exact lists use a B-tree for the lookups to ensure that highest performance is reached even when you load millions of domains into these lists.