Why not check for gawk and if it is present use it and if not fall back to busybox awk ?
So make gawk optional?
It is the way it worked before, AFAIK.
That is true, gawk is at least twice faster for me. But why making it obligatory?
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That was the old behavior.
Much better performance, less testing & easier to maintain.
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... and higher space requirement in space-constraint environment.
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As said before, it's a trade off ... and even on my 128 MByte router I can still load more than 300K domains without hitting any OOM conditions.
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I don't see what's wrong with making the gawk package being obligatory, because limited storage devices are no longer supported by OpenWrt 23 or Snapshot and thanks to the gawk package the locklist load time goes from 3 minutes to just over 1 minute.
The packages that we need to request to be updated are:
- "luci-app-sqm" (sqm-scripts), it steals almost a "1 MiB" of storage because it installs all obsolete
iptablesdependencies that are not needed and never will be. - "tc" (iproute2) package used by luci-app-sqm also installs all obsolete
iptablesdependencies. - "luci-app-unbound", I don't know how much storage this package steals but it must be a lot, this package was never upgraded to JavaScript and is still based on "lua" and installs all the obsolete dependencies of "lua" and "luci-compat".
@EricLuehrsen, @jow, @daniel, @hnyman, @moeller0 and @aparcar.
@anon8176936 Please be so kind and discuss such things outside of this thread - many thanks!
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Is it the awk that hits memory limit?
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I prefer giving user more space to decide whether he prefers storage space or processing speed. I have Alix board at my parent's with 4Gb and I choose gawk because 1 minute 25 seconds to process ~250k list is much better than 3 minute and 30 seconds. But on Archer C6 v3 at my sister's I'd prefer saving space and RAM, it can't reliably run with ~250k lists (I switch to oisd_small instead of oisd_big). On my Xiaomi AX3200 I care not if it takes 25 seconds or 1 minute to process same 250k list.
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adblock 4.2.2 is now in the main- and 23.05-branch, see:
The gawk dependency remains for the reasons already mentioned. However, adblock now accepts busybox awk again and the readme describes two officially unsupported installation variants.
This is planned to be the last intermediate release before adblock 5 release series.
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Just an FYI to others, don’t remove opkg! 
root@router:~# opkg upgrade adblock
Upgrading adblock on root from 4.2.1-1 to 4.2.2-1...
Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.4/packages/x86_64/packages/adblock_4.2.2-1_all.ipk
Installing rpcd-mod-rpcsys (2023-07-01-c07ab2f9-1) to root...
Downloading https://downloads.openwrt.org/releases/23.05.4/packages/x86_64/base/rpcd-mod-rpcsys_2023-07-01-c07ab2f9-1_x86_64.ipk
opkg was autoinstalled and is now orphaned, removing.
Refusing to remove essential package opkg.
Removing an essential package may lead to an unusable system, but if
you enjoy that kind of pain, you can force opkg to proceed against
its will with the option: --force-removal-of-essential-packages
Configuring rpcd-mod-rpcsys.
Configuring adblock.
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Oh man, thanks for the important hint! 
Thanks for the report - fixed in 4.2.2-r3.
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Same applies to this kind of post.
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My post informs that more than one person has the same issue. Your snide comment was unwarranted.
Yours is the only snide comment here. Calling someone's work laughable, that they share for free is just rude. Could have worded that so much better, or ask for more documentation in a friendly way.
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In fairness the Installation documentation could do with improvement.
I did find this useful guide, https://www.linuxscrew.com/openwrt-adblock-ad-blocking
It is over two years old and needs updating, but it is the best that I could find.
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I was running Adblock v4.2.2-2 on OpenWrt v23.05.4 with very poor adblocking results.
I tested with Toolz/Adblock Test from https://d3ward.github.io/ and it confirmed a very low score of 3%.
I uninstalled Adblock and installed Adguard Home and again tested with Toolz/Adblock Test and this time I saw repeated scores above 90%.
The Firefox extension Adblocker Ultimate on both macOS and Ubuntu is the best I have used, but I was looking for site wide Adblocking on the my Ubiquiti USG-3P to cover devices such as the ATV.
I would be willing to try Adblock again if the default configuration produced a Adblocking score of better than 3%.
