Huge Update To Ad List That The Pi-hole Uses
[UPDATE]: Phil shared an adList.conf from February 2015, which you can download and put onto your Pi if you already overwrote it with the big list mentioned in this post. From your Pi, you can run this command:
sudo curl -s -o /etc/dnsmasq.d/adList.conf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/16366947/Files/adList-2015-02.conf
The mahakala ad list just had a huge update, which pushes the compiled list of domains to over 900K entries, which unfortunately makes the Pi-hole perform poorly (but there is a fix). See the output of the gravity script below (it looks a little different because of some changes I made in the development branch).
Getting adaway.org list... Getting adblock.gjtech.net list... Getting adblock.mahakala.is list... Getting hosts-file.net list... Getting www.malwaredomainlist.com list... Getting pgl.yoyo.org list... Getting someonewhocares.org list... Getting winhelp2002.mvps.org list... ** Aggregating list of domains... ** Blacklisting 2 domain(s)... ** Whitelisting 15 domain(s)... ** 975358 domains being pulled in by gravity... ** 920553 unique domains trapped in the event horizon.
Too Many Entries Makes The Pi-hole Perform Poorly
The Raspberry Pi has a hard time parsing such a huge list and the performance really takes a hit, which makes Web browsing very slow. If you happen to have an adList.conf from before the update, I would like to have it. Contact me if you do. But for now, you will probably want to hold off on running the gravity script.
The Fix
If you already ran the script and have the huge list, you can comment out the line containing the mahakala domain and then run the script again. The list will be smaller than before, and will not work quite as well.
Hosts Format
Alternatively, it has been said that using a hosts file format, will improve the performance, but I haven’t tested this yet…
Continuing Development
I just blog on the side and write scripts like the Pi-hole and mostly do it for fun. But if you want to contribute something to the project, feel free using the buttons below.
I will be implementing things like:
- A Web interface
- Improved speed via:
- base64 1×1 png (or smaller)
- hosts file format
- data expirations/cache (less queries = better performance)