Will Pi-hole slow down my network?

No.

In fact, it can usually make your network faster for the following reasons:

  • advertisement assets (images/video) are not downloaded
  • DNS queries are cached
  • only DNS traffic (port 53) passes through Pi-hole

The last bullet in that list is important, because unlike a proxy server, Pi-hole only handles the DNS queries, which are relatively small. Even on a 100Mb network card, Pi-hole can handle a lot of clients at once. The most we have heard of is 250 clients on a Raspberry Pi 2B.

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