Dear Community,
I am reaching out to inquire about the compatibility of Pi-hole version 6 with the Raspberry Pi 3. I have been using Pi-hole for quite some time, and it has worked flawlessly until the recent update. Since then, my Raspberry Pi 3 has become unresponsive.
It seems like many other users are experiencing similar problems with version 6 on the Raspberry Pi 3.
In general, is the Raspberry Pi 3 still able to run and host the latest version 6 of Pi-hole?
Is it advisable to upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 for better performance and more RAM?
Additionally, would it be better to perform a fresh install on the Raspberry Pi 3, or is it possible to downgrade back to version 5 if I decide to stick with it?
Does it makes sense to try "sudo pihole -r " (Reconfigure or Repair Pi-hole subsystems)
Perhaps, if something is broken that the repair script is intended to fix.
Likely not, as that has been merged into development already.
But you have a huge gravity database, weighing over 600M, and your long term database size of ~500M would have kept your RPi 3 quite busy during the upgrade's database conversion.
Since you observe a malformed error, please check your database intergrity and share the results of:
Given the size of your databases, this may take a rather long time to complete, may well be several minutes.
Your debug log shows that your webserver.threads are set to 0 (default), to have the webserver determine a thread count value.
We've received reports that explicitly setting that value has improved web UI responsiveness.
Both checks returned OK just a few seconds later. It took not very much time—less than 10 seconds for sure, maybe even less than that.
I also changed webserver.threads to 6, as you advised.
After that, I made an update since new updates have been available since today.
I will provide an update after I check the new configuration during the day.
Maybe a stupid question, but anyway, why is it recommended to run Pi-hole in a Docker container?
From my perspective, I would prefer to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible. Doesn’t Docker add another layer of complication to a simple setup like Pi-hole on a very lightweight Raspberry Pi?
I just want to gain a better understanding of your advice.
PS: Right now, the Pi-hole is updating the gravity.
You are misreading my answer.
There is no general recommendation to run Pi-hole in Docker of bare metal.
Installing a previous version is just easier with Docker, as you just need to pull the respective image, e.g. docker pull pihole/pihole:2024.07.0 for the last v5 one.
Installing a previous Pi-hole version via CLI would require to manually pull specific component versions and to manual change the installation script used.
I apologize for my misreading of your comment. I was not attentive enough.
Mea culpa!
Thank you very much for your clarification.
Quick Update on My Pi-hole
I wanted to share a short update on my Pi-hole setup based on your advice:
Changed webserver.threads to 6: Following your suggestion, I adjusted the webserver.threads setting to 6. This change has made a noticeable difference!
Running pihole -f: I also executed the command pihole -f to flush the DNS query logs.
Successful Tree Building: After implementing these two steps, I was finally able to complete the tree building process after updating the gravity. This is a significant milestone for me, as I had been struggling with this issue since the last update, and it always seemed to fail before.
I think everything is running smoothly and as intended again.