I've setup Pi Hole on a virtual server running Debian testing.
It works fine for most of the websites I visit, but some websites load extremely slow. Examples are heise.de, mobile.de, kicker.de, and telefon-treff.de. On other websites, the website loads, but parts of it are missing, like the pictures for the articles on golem.de apart from the five to six articles on top of the page.
It seems like part of the requests for these websites run into timeouts, leading to load times on the order of 30 to 60 seconds.
Other websites, like tagesschau.de work fine without any noticeable delays.
I've recorded a debug log and uploaded it under token h9hx823cgp.
I've checked my firewall and found several connection attempts on port 443 that were dropped. By allowing HTTPS/port 443 for those clients allowed to use Pi Hole all the websites mentioned above load almost instantly.
I just don't understand the connection between the problem and traffic on port 443 as I thought Pi Hole would only need port 53/DNS to work properly (and the web interface on port 80).
All ads will be redirected to the Pi-hole's IP address. If they are requested over HTTPS, then they try to get the ads via HTTPS (i.e. port 443) from the Pi-hole. If your firewall simply drops the packages, the browser doesn't get any reply and, hence, waits for a long time, maybe periodically repeating its request. If however, your firewall does not silently drop the packages, they will reach the Pi-hole device which will respond with: "Whoops, what you are looking for is not here." and the browser stops loading them, accordingly (and just leaves them out).
That uses all https requests. Check out a blocked request via the dev tools (F12) Networking tab. Send a screenshot of one of the request's Timing section.
That means that the port 443 on the Pi-hole is not rejecting traffic. It's actually dropping it, meaning that it doesn't tell the requester to stop waiting around for an answer. If you set it to reject traffic, then the browser will know to stop waiting for it.
Thank you. It is faster, but still much slower than without Pi Hole. The website now takes about 15-20 seconds to start to load. Some other sites still are slower.
Do you have any other suggestions?