I noticed the more adblock lists I add, the slower the router becomes.
I understand of course, the more work to be done the more CPU you need.
But is the impact of loading lists of ascii data so huge?
on a TP-Link WR1043ND V2 I can't load all the lists. If I load them all, the unit just gets non-responsive and keeps rebooting.
When I load 120.000 entries from various lists it pikes at 100% for core 0 several times. GUI unresponsive.. but after initial loading it works so it seems. But loading all lists is just too much.
Is this just the way it is, because the TP-Link isn't fast enough, or some bug? Especially the non-responsive and keep rebooting when loading all the lists I can't understand. why rebooting? wouldn't just "loading for a long time and wait until everything is loaded" be the expected behavior?
Now of course I disabled sysctl, whocares, winhelp (especially winhelp seems to kill the router and go into reboot modus on a loop) as these 3 seem the biggest impact.
You are RAM constrained. Your device has only 64 MB RAM which needs to hold the kernel, all running programs etc. Each entry in DNS lookup table in dnsmasq takes permanently some bytes.
You may check the memory situation from console: cat /proc/meminfo
With a device with only 64 MB RAM you can't select all blocklists. 120 000 entries sounds much too much. Lets assume 50 bytes per entry, which would mean 6 MB RAM consumption for just those...
(I haven't checked how many bytes each entry really takes in dnsmasq, but that calculation shows you the general picture.
You need to select the most important blocklists for you.
There is a close connection between number of activated adblock lists and space/RAM requirements ... the default configuration should run just fine, even on low power devices. The adblock package itself has nearly "no" space requirements.
In my personal opinion, 3-4 lists is all that is required, e.g. I'm using default lists plus adguard.
