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by kennywinker1 days ago |
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upvoteby undersuit1 days ago|
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I run my Pihole on the first Pi... the 256mb version.

  dietpi@solo:~$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:             223          54          18          11         170         169
  Swap:            767          10         757
I also have a RPi3 with Pihole, Unbound, and Tailscale... for Tailscale:

  dietpi@cubano:~$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:             956         233         473          24         289         722
  Swap:           1088           0        1088
Still plenty of space in 1GB of ram, and OpenWRT is probably a bit more compact than DietPi.
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upvoteby ssl-31 days ago|
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How many blocklists does one need to have in order for them to use >900 megabytes of RAM?
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upvoteby kennywinker1 days ago|
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I mean, there is a lot of spam on the internet.

But pihole asks for a pi with 512gb ram. Add openwrt’s 100mb, now your ram budget for running something else (file server, pairdrop, irc, tailscale, etc) is <400mb. One nodejs app could use all of that.

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upvoteby brunorro1 days ago|
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pihole is based on glibc, uses GNU utils and being based in Debian probably it's not compiled to optimize space. OpenWRT is based on musl, uses busybox, it is space contrained and size matters.

Motorbike analogy, it's like comparing a RS125 with a Tmax/Burgman maxiscooter...

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upvoteby ssl-31 days ago|
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I mean:

On one hand, 400MB is still a ton of RAM to do useful work with -- and unused RAM is wasted RAM.

On the other hand: How many non-routing tasks do you really expect or require a ~$100 home-router-device to perform? :)

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upvoteby brunorro12 hours ago|
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I'm old, "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" goes against my philosophy. Back in my days, a professor said in class: you want your OS as light as possible, so the more free resources you have, the faster Quake will run (by the time, Quake was software rendered). Saving resources for a rainy day today is better than saying "umbrellas are too expensive" tomorrow.
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upvoteby kennywinker1 days ago|
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Require? Just OpenWRT + blocky. Expect? As much as I can get! I run a full home server, but if I could offload some things to a router, i would.
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upvoteby ssl-31 days ago|
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Right. I often do a lot of things with openwrt, too. They've just all happened to fit within ~100MB, historically.

And even then, I try to keep it vaguely "minimal." I don't offload as much as I can; I try to keep the router-box focused mostly on router-duties. This is because I don't want to have too many dependencies within the router: I'm really not looking to create trouble with the single-point-of-failure device that connects everything I have to the rest of the world.

This is in large part for very practical reasons. If I manage to completely stuff up the router somehow, which isn't particularly unlikely, then I really need to be able to put it back together quickly (so I'm back online quickly) without worrying about a pile of non-routing things.

If I were to put as much stuff as possible into openwrt (as I certainly can; it is just a Linux box after all), then I think I'd quickly find that it'd be better to spin up OpenWRT in a VM on a Real Computer than to keep trying to shoehorn new roles into deliberately-limited hardware.

But maybe that's just me. I got over the idea of running weird stuff on tiny hardware for the lulz nearly 20 years ago, when I was playing with a new WD MyBook World Edition 1TB networked hard drive (which was a Linux box with a shell and a package manager and a whole terabyte of local storage, even though the the sum of the parts was slow AF).

It was fun for a bit to push that limited hardware in interesting ways, and I probably did even run an IRC client on it at some point, but I'm over it. :)

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