If you have been struggling with a slow Web interface, you’ll love this update. There are plenty of details on this new feature, but if you are a casual user, the only thing you need to know is that it is fast. This release also has some other things you will enjoy. Read on to find out more or check out changes.pi-hole.net.

Faster Than Light (FTL) Engine

FTL will be a core component of Pi-hole going forward and just like the rest of our code, it’s completely open source. FTL is our new API and it can already do quite a bit. It’s also the first step towards implementing our highest-voted feature request of implementing long-term statistics for Pi-hole.

The biggest thing you will notice after updating is how fast your Web interface will perform–especially on older model Raspberry Pi’s.

We have also tested it with some heavy hardware and it can handle several million queries without missing a beat.

To give you a real life example, we have been testing FTL on a 4GB droplet via DigitalOcean and we were well over one hundred million queries in 24 hours. Loading all these stats in the Web interface takes only a matter of seconds–compare that to PHP, which would have quickly crashed trying to parse that much information.

You’ll also see some advanced graphs on the Dashboard page.

You’ll also notice speed improvements on the query log page and we have a new box under the settings page, so you can see how it is performing.

If for some reason FTL does stop working, the interface will fall back to PHP.

Also included is a way to tail the FTL log.

We love FTL and we think you will, too, but there’s still a lot more we included in the release, making it worth of the bump to 3.0…

Manage Source Lists In The Web Interface

We were finally able to implement a long-awaited feature request, which allows you to edit the source lists used by Pi-hole via the Web interface. You could always do this before, but it should be much easier now.

Just remember, they need to be in HOSTS format to be compatible. If you want to find some more lists to use, check out WaLLy3K’s compilation.

The default lists we provide are usually sufficient for most people, but some like to use Pi-hole to block other things like malware or tracking/phishing sites.

Not Brand New, But Worth Another Mention…

DHCP Reservations

Some Pi-hole users didn’t use the built-in DHCP server since they didn’t think they could assign reservations, but since this has existed since Web v2.5.

Pi-hole Checkout

This feature actually debuted in a dot release (2.13.2 /2.5.2) and you can now easily checkout what’s happening in our development environment

This feature allowed many of you to easily help us test FTL. We want Pi-hole to be as stable as possible, so if you’re willing to help test things out for us in in development, this is the best way to do it.

Just use this command:

pihole checkout dev

To return to the stable code:

pihole checkout master

More details on the command can be found here.

Other Features

IPv6 Upstream Servers

We have implemented full support for IPv6 upstream DNS servers.

Bug Fixes And Tweaks

There are a lot of fixes and tweaks; we mostly keep these on the GitHub repos for those who are really interested so feel free to check them out.

What’s Next?

As long as you keep supporting us, we’ll keep working to improve the product.

We all volunteer our time, so your donations help keep us motivated.

If you don’t want to send us money directly, you can still support us by signing up for services using our affiliate links below or buying merchandise from our store. This helps keep our servers and infrastructure up and running.

Now that the performance of Pi-hole is back where it should be (lightweight and fast), we will start to focus on features you want as well as any bug fixes to maintain stability.