The original post: /r/pihole by /u/Castriff on 2024-10-28 20:51:16.
(I submitted a post earlier today saying that the issue was only occurring on one device, but my roommate is reporting lag again so I deleted it and rewrote it here with other details.)
I'm going to try to be thorough, because I'm not certain which details are relevant and which aren't. Let me know if I need to provide anything else.
My Pihole is set up on a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B running Bookworm on a 32 GB SD. My router is a Google Nest Pro Wifi with three nodes: the main node is in the living room connected to the modem, one node is in my room and the other is in my roommate's. My Pi is powered through PoE on a TP-Link 5 port Gigabit PoE switch, connected to the router in my room, and both the wifi node and the PoE switch are hooked up to a 950VA UPS (we have a lot of brownouts in our apartment, the UPS keeps things stable). The Pi has static IPv4 addresses for both ethernet and wifi set via the router. I have the router set to give DHCP solely to the Pihole's ethernet address, and pass out the Pihole as the DNS server as well for both IPv4 and IPv6. I use the Pihole as both DNS and DHCP, but currently only a few of my devices are using ad filtering. My roommate's devices aren't being filtered at all. My expectation was that this setup would be sufficient to test the Pi-hole for a while and then eventually add my roommate's devices to the filtering group as well. That hasn't happened. I've been chasing down this issue on and off for a couple months now.
When I navigate to certain domains, I will sometimes see them take anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds to load content, and occasionally not all the content will load fully unless I refresh the page. I haven't been able to figure out why this is happening. It occurs at random times of day on random websites, no websites are affected consistently as far as I can tell, and it doesn't ever seem to affect more than one device at a time. We've had this issue most often with our Windows 10 PCs; other devices seem to be less affected.
For a while I thought that the issue must have been the router nodes, so last week I went and got them replaced under warranty. It seems to have improved things somewhat for some devices, but the PCs are still having issues. I also switched out the PoE splitter I was using with the Pi for a Waveshare PoE hat (the Pi would restart on its own sometimes; as far as I can tell the majority of the PC issues were happening even when the Pi was operating properly, but I thought it was worth addressing).
The Pi was' disconnected while I waited for the PoE hat to come in, but now that the Pi is back up my roommate and I are now seeing the lag issue again. We did some speed tests today and found that the download speed dropped from 437 Mbps without the Pihole DNS to 77 when it's enabled. I've heard multiple times that the Pihole is supposed to make the network faster, not slower, so I don't understand what's gone wrong with our setup. Am I using the wrong settings, or is there something physically wrong with the Pi?
Also, I'm not sure whether this is relevant, but I've noticed that when my own laptop is dealing with this, I tail pihole.log, and the issue seems to clear up right after a set of DHCPDISCOVER and DHCPOFFER calls are sent out. The MAC address on those calls is for the primary Nest Pro router node, but the IP address of the router isn't changing (which I obviously wouldn't want). I've been wondering whether the issue has something to do with this, or if it's just a coincidence. The calls look like this:
Oct 28 10:49:16 dnsmasq-dhcp[11352]: DHCPDISCOVER(eth0) 24:e5:0f:bf:5f:46
Oct 28 10:49:16 dnsmasq-dhcp[11352]: DHCPOFFER(eth0) 192.168.86.206 24:e5:0f:bf:5f:46
Oct 28 10:49:16 dnsmasq-dhcp[11352]: DHCPDISCOVER(wlan0) 24:e5:0f:bf:5f:46
Oct 28 10:49:16 dnsmasq-dhcp[11352]: DHCPOFFER(wlan0) 192.168.86.206 24:e5:0f:bf:5f:46
If it's not relevant to the PCs, do I need to be concerned about it at all? If so, I'd like to take steps to fix that as well.
Again, please let me know if I need to provide any other information. Thank you.
Debug token: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/nMqMxgDe/
