[SOLVED] PiHole Breaks PLEX?

[z0ki]

Hi guys I got an issue I am hoping someone can help me with. 

 

I followed SpaceInvaders tutorial and all went smoothly and Pi Hole is setup on my unRaid Server. Now my issue lies with Plex. 

 

For some reason when Pi Hole is on all the thumbnails (such as cast thumbnails etc) in Plex take FOREVER to load. Now when I disable Pi Hole completely then everything loads up very quickly. I originally thought it may have been a blacklist that was causing an issue so I removed everything and done a fresh install of Pi Hole (with the default lists) and the images still take forever to load. Checking in Network and nothing seems to be blocked from Pi Hole regarding PLEX.

 

It just seems like traffic speed is crippled? I am using 1.1.1.1 - 1.0.0.1 as my DNS in Pi Hole. Everything else on my network is working and loading fast as usual, it is only PLEX that is the issue.

 

Here is a video demonstration of what is going on. The first part of the video is with the Pi Hole DNS completely off my Router (Pi Hole is off then) as you can see everything loads instantaneously. 

 

Now the second half I add my Pi Holes's DNS into my Router, reboot etc, and look at how slow all the images are loading. This happens on PLEX on every device on the network. It is like the speeds are crippled into the Kbps. When the Pi Hole DNS is removed and I check my bandwidth when images are loaded it ranges between 6Mbps-40Mbps. 

 

I also want add something that I think is of some importance here: When PIHOLE is on, it cripples the speed of my entire unRaid server. Even clicking on Apps, the Community apps page takes forever to load or doesn't load at all. 

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by z0ki

[bonienl]

Don't use pihole as DNS server for Unraid itself.

Configure Unraid with "regular" DNS entries (your example 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1)

[z0ki]

6 minutes ago, bonienl said:

Don't use pihole as DNS server for Unraid itself.

Configure Unraid with "regular" DNS entries (your example 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1)

Hmm where would I change this? 

 

Are you talking about this section as shown here? That 192.168.1.99 is the PiHole DNS

 

 

Would I change it to this?

 

Edited September 2, 2019 by z0ki

[trott]

frankly speaking, I don't get it why pihole will cripple you speed, it just a dns server; try run dig google.com in CLI  to see if there is any issue

[z0ki]

I do not know either, but it does. It doesn't cripple it on any other device just my unRaid server. 

 

Anyway. 

 

Following @bonienl's recommendation (hopefully this was what he was talking about, let me know mate ) to change the unRaid DNS to 1.1.1.1 - 1.0.0.1 in the section below does seem to have fixed this issue. PiHole is now blocking ads across the network (as it did before) but only this time PLEX and any internet bandwidth required for unRaid is at full speed from what I can see. PLEX thumbnails/icons are loading instantaneous across all devices, Community Apps loads instantly too.   

 

I will tinker with it more tonight and see how it performs and if all is okay, I will mark this as [SOLVED] tomorrow. 

 

[bonienl]

9 hours ago, z0ki said:

Following @bonienl's recommendation

You did correctly  

[z0ki]

On 9/3/2019 at 2:59 AM, bonienl said:

You did correctly  

Excellent. Can confirm all is working properly now! 

 

Thank you very much @bonienl 👌

 

MARKED AS SOLVED

[daves]

I had a similar experience.  It would be great if anyone has any theories as to WHY pihole breaks everything...

[chepnut]

So glad I found this thread, I have been having other plex issues all week and finally got it sorted out, installed pihole yesterday and went to watch some shows as a family.  Well after about the 100th freeze during the night my family all looked at me, with the "look"  that goes beyond WAF and into FAF.   Changed my DNS on unraid to point to googles and so far so good.  And tested it on the all important roku in the room we watch stuff as a family.  

No idea on why it would cause a system wide unraid network issue, but digging through the plex logs last night I couldn't find anything that stood out as a issue, thats when I started doing some searches for possible solutions.   Now I have to go and try to figure out how to fix homeassistant after the last update broke my automations.