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Comment by fnord77 | Hacker News Reader

Would a Pi4 be able to handle being both a VPN and a pihole, or should these be two separate boxes?

I set my Pi4 up with wireguard+pihole recently. I think pihole does nothing 99.99% of the time, so I can’t speak to how performance is in worst case scenarios, but wireguard seems fine. I get about 25 Mbps up/down (speedtest.net with a single client, so assume it’s 25 Mbps aggregate. Not a lot for hefty file transfers but comfy enough for VNC to multiple hosts. The big win is in decreased latency. I don’t have good quantifications of this beyond speedtest.net run from my work. 5 ms with no VPN. 82 ms using my router’s OpenVPN. 24 ms using Pi4 wireguard. These were just single runs so the strong law of small numbers may apply. I know iperf is more scientific, but I wanted a quick, empirical full internet test. My home internet is 550 Mbps down / 36 Mbps up.

Full data (iPhone 11 client at work):

No VPN: 145 / 139 / 5

Router OpenVPN: 25 / 6 / 82

pi4 wireguard: 24 / 27 / 24

The hit you are taking seems larger than it should be. Have you tried different speedtest severs?

Is your no vpn sample still on the same home network? Or are you comparing your mobile data or another network to your home network (through vpn)

If the former is true, that seems like quite a significant penalty to pay for using wg.

All three runs were on work wifi. There is some bottleneck in between my work and apartment since my apartment connection is 550 / 36. It isn’t a test of raw wireguard performance, but rather a realistic best case scenario for full internet tunneling on the go.

Could you recommend something that would have 2x NVME for the home internet part?

RK3399 based boards are interesting but there is only 1x NVME on the Rockpi4 NVME extender.

The Nvidia Jetson nano extenders use USB3, which is not acceptable for the usecase

Yes.

Being a VPN and a DNS server are both extremely light weight tasks that use (mostly) orthogonal resources (VPN = IO, DNS ~ fairly small IO and CPU).

Been using the Pi1 for a couple years now with OpenVPN and Pihole, never had problems (though the only one using the VPN is me, at any time), so I'd say the Pi4 should be more than capable :-)

I run both on my Pi4 and still have plenty of resources to spare.

I run both, along with docker on a Pi Zero and there's still some RAM to spare.

Yep! This is how I started out (I run it one a VPS now so I'm not tied to my home network) and it works fine. The only limit you're likely to run into is your blocklists filling RAM. I have a 5M+ long blocklist and it won't fit into 1GB, so you might want to spec up a little bit in that area, depending on how block-happy you are.

I run mine as both a OpenHAB and as PiHole server. I dont see why not. Of course a VPN might be slightly more involved. I am thinking of splitting it up and doing a VPN with PiHole though so I can get access to my internal network to manage OpenHAB remotely. I want my OpenHAB Pi to be stand alone.

I have the original Pi 3. It handles both of these tasks just fine and with throughput to spare.

I'm running both on a Pi 2 (without a heat sink).

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