Hello!
10 days ago I saw this tutorial and I have ordered an Orange Pi Zero 256 mb outright. Parcel is still in transit from China.
But few days ago I was researching about Pi-hole and found out that RAM 512 is required.
So anyone currently using this Orange Pi Zero 256mb?
Can you tell if it working well or not?
How much RAM available?
5 peoples using the same router and that will be almost 10 devices.
Thanks in advance for your advice!
You might be the test case. 256 MB RAM is pretty slim, but I suspect that if you keep your blocklists to a reasonable amount, it will work.
RAM usage is primarily driven by the number of domains in gravity and your blocking mode (not the number of users). The default blocking mode is NULL, and the Pi-Hole keeps every domain in gravity twice in memory (one for the A record, one for the AAAA record). So, the more domains in gravity, the more memory. You can change your blocking mode and reduce the memory use as described in the threads below.
For a single point of comparison, a Pi Zero with 512 MB of RAM (Stretch - not lite, Pi-Hole with the default blacklists and NULL blocking) shows the following memory use (and the Pi-Hole dashboard reports memory usage at 28%):
pi@PiZeroWHDev:~ $ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 443868 112244 39428 13980 292196 265044
Swap: 102396 6400 95996
Thank you.
I'm thinking about buying a 512 mb model. But I don't know what to do with 256mb that's in transit.
Use it as a second Pi-Hole in parallel. This gives you redundancy.
Like second place of DNS servers?
Okay thank you very much!
Many users run two Pi-Holes. Pi1 at static IP1, Pi2 at static IP2. Configure them the same, list the DNS in the router IP1 and IP2.
There is no active load balancing, but since each can carry the entire load of the network, this isn't a problem.
Depending on your router and clients, one may receive much more of the load than the other. Or, they may be more balanced. I use Apple routers and my primary Pi-Hole gets about 99.5% of the traffic. But, the backup is always running and if the primary goes down it picks up all the traffic immediately. This is handy for when I'm fiddling with the primary Pi-Hole, for example.
A popular device for a second Pi-Hole is a Pi Zero. So, your 256 MB Orange Pi might work nicely.
Okay, I will try when it arrives. Thanks!
I'm using one of the early shipments of Raspberry Pi, version B (square edges) Revision 3 computers that has 256 MB of RAM and a Single-core 700Mhz BCM2835 CPU as a pi-hole.
It isn't bad at doing the DNS filtering, no problems there. It does suffer slowdowns when you access via VNC or the web server for the dashboard and other simple pages. Looking at longer more complicated pages and queries slows the Pi B to a crawl or can render it unresponsive. CPU at 100% and it looks like the free memory is exhausted and the swap is getting full.
I'm not intending to try and fix things, I'm upgrading to a newer Pi when I have some free time but I thought the above numbers and results could be helpful.
Thank you!
Update!
Run very well even with 300k of list!! RAM don't even reach 50%!
I'm using a very old 2Gb class 4 micro SD card just for testing but it turn out to be running just fine so I'm stick with it.
I'm only the one using cause Pi-hole don't have feature temporary allow like in u-Block. So I'm testing it before someone else will complain why can't access some web.
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