Firefox slows down with Pi-Hole, other browsers do not

Help Community Help
1

Expected Behaviour:

Websites should load rapidly through Pi-Hole on all browsers.

Actual Behaviour:

Firefox (latest stable version) on MacOS Big Sur lags significantly (can be 4-5, can be over 30 seconds) before partially or fully loading webpages through Pi-Hole, other browsers do not lag (indeed are blazingly fast). DNS-over-HTTPS is off (network.trr.mode 5). When I turn DoH on (to bypass Pi-Hole) pages load snappily again. Issue the same with or without the small number of add-ons I use in FF. When the page itself appears the elements on the page take a long time to come up which seems to indicate that the slow DNS queries are playing a role there too.

To illustrate this problem, I attach a HAR file with timings from the Firefox browser from trying to load the GOV.UK websites (UK government page). This took over 30 seconds to load on Firefox. Much of the timings report 'Blocked'). www.gov.uk_Archive [21-01-08 17-56-37].har.zip (144.1 KB)

Pi-Hole is configured over ipv4 and ipv6 (with ULA) through a Fritz!Box router. The Pi-Hole is configured to use DoH using cloudflared as described in the documentation.

Debug Token:

https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/oygnsh12fv

Thank you very much.

2

Are you running Little Snitch on Big Sur?

3

No, but I am running Lulu

4

Try changing your blocking mode in Pi-hole to NXDOMAIN. Users have reported this resolves the page loading speed in some cases on MacOS Big Sur.

The Little Snitch website has a good description of why this causes problems with their software. Perhaps the problem extends to Lulu.

5

After doing that and using pihole -g it appears to have greatly sped up — it seems the issue may extend to Lulu too. Thank you!

6

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.