Experiencing Major Slowdowns Across iOS w/ Blokada Enabled

Support
1

Hi

A few weeks ago I started using Blokada in search of a better adblocker as I’ve been using Adblock Green off of the App Store for the better part of a year now, which gets the job done but wasn’t ideal as I still saw banner ads on YouTube and video ads through the app (thus I’ve been watching YouTube via Safari instead).

Unfortunately, since I’ve had Blokada installed I’ve only used it 5% of the time because of massive and very annoying slowdowns system-wide that I’ve been experiencing since day 1 of using the app.

Here’s some specs that might help track this issue down:

For a device, I’m running 3 actually, and I’ve experienced the same slowdowns on all of them. That being my iPhone X, 12.9" iPad Pro (2nd Generation), and iPad Mini 4.

All 3 devices are running iOS 14.4.

In the case of my iPhone, I experience the slowdowns on both LTE and WiFi.

My home internet speeds typically run between 800Mbps and 1 Gigabit on Ethernet (on a PC, for example), or around 400Mbps on these 3 devices via WiFi.

In regards to the slowdowns specifically, they are really bad (and very frustrating) in my opinion with the App Store taking around 2 to 4 times the amount of time it normally takes to load, with YouTube being another example. The slowdowns effect every other website I’ve visited as well - Twitter, Amazon, Newegg, etc, etc, all taking around twice if not four times the amount of time to load.

These slowdowns instantly go away upon deactivating Blokada. Things I have tried to fix this include restarting my router, restarting all 3 devices with and without Blokada running, disabling any and all blocklists, reinstalling the app, changing DNS servers via the “Encryption & DNS” section of Blokada, and manually setting a connection to Cloudflare’s DNS server with the “1.1.1.1” address via WiFi settings in iOS.

Lastly, I have ran Speedtests for the heck of it, and oddly enough they does not register the slowdowns as I typically get the same results with or without Blokada enabled at around 400Mbps on all of my devices.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I love the concept of Blokada, it’s just disappointing that I can’t use it on a daily basis because the slowdowns are so extreme.

Thanks!

2

Hello, welcome to our family!

This is by far the best issue report I’ve seen in a long time, thanks!

The issue you’re experiencing most likely is due to the DNS lookup mechanism.
We had to take some shortcuts in order to make the iOS release happen. While we’re aware it’s not optimal, we didn’t believe it would cause this amount of issues for someone.

Every bit of latency you have on your connection (round trip time, not bandwidth speed) will cause a threefold delay for you as a user while resolving domains.
This is why you get decent speed tests (bandwidth) but load times are still slow.

We are working to resolve this issue, but it’s complicated and will take some time.
Thanks again for reaching out!

3

Thank you for replying! I’m in no hurry, so take your time in regards to getting this fixed. I’m just glad to know a fix is on the way.

Thanks!

1 Like
4

Is there a workaround for the time being while keeping Blokada going?

5

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.