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Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

curious about the performance issue. Would the impact on performance be larger than a similarly sized block list in a browser plugin?

I have a netbook, so always want to keep an eye out on performance.

I wonder if there's a GUI application which enables these hosts sources to be tweaked, searched, whitelisted etc

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I use this on Windows. For a large hosts file (several megabytes), I find the DNS client service hangs until it reads the whole file. Further, there is also a noticeable delay in the order of a few seconds until the hostname is resolved. For smaller files, I find there is no noticeable lag. Can't offer you any numbers though.

Hostsman (http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman) on windows is the my choice of a frontend for hosts management. It's free but not open source.

Slower DNS responses with big hosts file is something to be expected.

The solution is to feed the data to a DNS caching resolver such as unbound or dnsmasq, as I have explained in reply to UserRights.

Answering here also to point out I originally implemented this on a 5y old netbook (Atom CPU, 1GB RAM) because I tend to have a lot of tabs open in firefox, and ABP's memory usage quickly becomes noticeable, and then comes the swapping. Running unbound+nginx scales remarquably well, without hogging too much memory at startup. (Sorry, I don't have access to the netbook right now to report real numbers).

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