4 Reasons 16GB Is Overkill for Pi-Hole + Unbound

Idle RAM usage is under 300MB Pi-hole and Unbound together idle at roughly 200-300MB of RAM. Even under heavy load, you won’t hit 1GB.

More RAM won’t speed up DNS queries The bottleneck is CPU and network latency, not memory. Throwing more RAM at DNS resolution does nothing for query speed.

Extra RAM draws power for no gain That additional 8GB will sit completely unused, drawing a tiny bit more power without improving performance.

Spend money on what actually matters If you want faster DNS, improve your upstream resolver or network round-trip time. Save the cash for a UPS or a faster SD card instead.