Sites are very slow

Help
1

I find some sites slow to load. Especially, when I open a youtube video. The page opens up fast, but video does not play. Then after a few sec, its starts to play. I have run pihole -d and uploaded the logs. Token: xacu2h7rno

I am using google dns for upstream. My vps is Lightsail by Amazon. On the firewall by Amazon, I have port 443, 80, 53 (UDP and TCP) open.

I have also noticed that, blocked sites that are not https get a pihole block page and sites that are https get this page

nopage.PNG808×464 10.5 KB

Same with youtube. When there is a youtube ad waiting to play, they video sticks for a few seconds, but if there is no ads then video streams normally.

Seems like something to do the way Amazon has setup their VPS. They seem to Nat traffic. In my case its https related issues.

Just read this article. How Pi-Hole Handles HTTPS / SSL - #3 by diginc

My issue is something like this. I guess, Youtube ads over https is waiting to time out and then it starts to play. The same with the block page. I dont get a block page if the site is using https.

Any work around. My users on my network will call me every sec, if they are waiting for a site to show something or if they find youtube stuck. Can we just redirect to a message if the site is blocked over ssl.

Thanks folks

2

There are many youtube threads going on, and some users experience the black timeout before the video plays and some don't. It's still a work in progress. As you read in that article about SSL, we can't show anything for blocked https ads because Pi-hole doesn't have a valid certificate to show content for every ad domain. You can set up a self-signed certificate, but that gets into a lot of security issues and is generally not recommended unless you know what you're doing.

1 Like
3

I read an article somewhere and I changed the following.

sudo nano /etc/pihole/setupVars.conf

Then I changed Addresses into 0.0.0.0

PIHOLE_INTERFACE=eth0
IPV4_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0
IPV6_ADDRESS=0.0.0.0

Now, I don't have a block page. But YouTube does not slow down, when there is an advertisement in the beginning. When I visit blocked https sites. I get the default, page cannot be found. That's OK for me. I feel a speed bump in web browsing.

4

This fixed my problem, speed is like rocket now.

sudo nano /etc/dhcpcd.conf (comment them out like below, save restart)
#Generate Stable Private IPv6 Addresses instead of hardware based ones
#slaac private
#interface eth0
#static ip_address=172.31.14.106/20
#static routers=172.31.0.1
#static domain_name_servers=127.0.0.1

Reference:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/5xgybu/cant_get_pihole_correctly_working_on_amazon_ec2/