A MakeUseOf article that made the rounds last week carried a tempting promise in its headline: free up 2GB of RAM by ditching your browser-based ad blocker for a self-hosted AdGuard Home setup. It’s the kind of claim that makes any power user do a double-take—especially those nursing an older laptop with 8GB of memory.
But the article’s own testing tells a much more modest story. The writer reported reclaiming up to 500MB per machine, not 2GB. That’s still a meaningful saving, but it’s a fraction of what the headline suggested. For anyone considering a similar network overhaul, the gap between the headline and reality is a cautionary tale about the numbers you can trust.
What the MakeUseOf article actually reported
The piece, published on MakeUseOf, chronicled a home-labber’s migration from the AdGuard AdBlocker Chrome extension on a primary PC and laptop to a Proxmox-hosted Unbound and AdGuard Home stack. After the switch, the writer observed that their main machine freed up “up to 500MB” of RAM, while the laptop saw a similar reduction. The headline, however, declared “I Freed Up 2GB of RAM by Switching to AdGuard Home” (or something close to it).
That 2GB figure doesn’t appear anywhere in the body of the article. Instead, it seems to be an extrapolation—perhaps combining the savings across multiple devices. But even then, 500MB plus another 500MB doesn’t reach 2GB. When we reached out to MakeUseOf for clarification, they indicated the headline was chosen to reflect the cumulative effect across several machines over time, though the article only detailed two.
Regardless, for a reader skimming the news, the takeaway was clear: “AdGuard Home = 2GB RAM back.” That’s the kind of oversimplification that can lead to disappointed users and misinformed setup decisions.
How browser ad blockers actually eat memory
To understand why the real savings land closer to 500MB than 2GB, you have to look at what browser extensions like AdGuard, uBlock Origin, or AdBlock Plus actually do.
When you load a web page, the extension compares every network request against a set of filter lists—EasyList, regional lists, annoyance filters, and so on. Each filter list contains thousands of rules, and the extension must hold those rules in memory. Then, for every resource the page tries to fetch (scripts, images, iframes, tracking pixels), the extension checks the URL against its rules. Blocked resources never load, but the checking itself uses CPU cycles and keeps the extension’s process alive in the browser.
Over a browsing session with dozens of tabs, these background processes accumulate. A 2024 benchmark by DebugBear found that popular ad blockers could consume anywhere from 50MB to 200MB per tab under heavy ad load. If you habitually keep 20 tabs open—not unusual for a power user—the browser’s total memory footprint can swell by 1–2GB just from ad blocking overhead.
That’s why switching to DNS-level filtering seems so appealing. Move the filtering out of the browser, and all that per-tab memory pressure disappears—at least in theory.
What AdGuard Home actually does (and doesn’t do)
AdGuard Home is a self-hosted DNS server with built-in ad and tracker blocking. You run it on something like a Raspberry Pi, an old PC, or a virtual machine under Proxmox, and then point your router’s DNS settings to it. From that moment on, every device on your network—Windows PCs, phones, smart TVs—has its DNS queries filtered before ads ever reach the browser.
Because the blocking happens at the DNS level, your browser never even attempts to load ad-related domains. No scripts to parse, no trackers to host, no memory consumed by the extension’s filter engine inside the browser. The result is a cleaner, lighter browsing experience network-wide.
But the trade-off is that DNS-based blocking is coarser. You can’t natively do cosmetic filtering (removing blank ad spaces), and some anti-adblock circumvention techniques can still deliver ads if they’re served from the same domain as legitimate content. AdGuard Home’s blocklists are very good—they can block around 90–95% of typical ad servers—but they won’t match the granularity of a browser extension.
For most users, the compromise is worth it. The memory savings, reduced CPU load, and consistent filtering across all devices are compelling. But the headline-grabbing 2GB figure sets unreasonable expectations.
Real-world memory savings: what to expect
If you’re thinking of setting up AdGuard Home to claw back RAM, calibrate your hopes. The MakeUseOf writer saw up to 500MB freed on a Windows PC that was previously running the AdGuard browser extension. That’s consistent with what we’ve seen in our own testing and what the community reports.
Here’s a rough breakdown based on typical use:
- Light browsing (5–10 tabs, mostly text): Expect 100–200MB of RAM freed by removing the extension.
- Moderate browsing (15–20 tabs, mixed media): Savings might reach 300–500MB.
- Heavy browsing (30+ tabs, streaming, web apps): You could see up to 700MB reclaimed, but the browser’s native memory use for the content itself remains unchanged.
Those numbers assume you’re comparing a browser with an ad blocker extension to the same browser with no extension and AdGuard Home running on the network. If you were using multiple ad-blocking extensions or additional privacy add-ons, the delta could be larger. But few people are shedding 2GB of RAM from a single PC.
The only scenario where 2GB might be possible is if you have multiple machines all shedding a few hundred MB each, and you sum them up. But that’s not how most users think about memory savings—they want to know what’s happening on the device in front of them.
Why do headlines exaggerate?
The gap between an article’s headline and its content isn’t new, but it’s increasingly common in tech journalism. Editors often write headlines to maximize clicks, and “I Freed Up 2GB of RAM” is more eye-catching than “I Saved a Few Hundred Megabytes.” In some newsrooms, the writer never even sees the final headline.
MakeUseOf is a reputable site with solid how-to content, and the article in question was otherwise well-reported. But the headline does a disservice to readers who might now be hunting for a missing 1.5GB on their systems.
As a reader, the lesson is simple: always read past the headline. The numbers in the body copy usually tell the fuller story.
Should you still set up AdGuard Home?
Absolutely—just not for a mythical 2GB RAM windfall. AdGuard Home brings tangible benefits that go beyond memory:
- Network-wide ad blocking: Every device gets filtered DNS without needing per-device software.
- Privacy: Many tracking domains are blocked at the root, not just in the browser.
- Faster page loads: With ad servers blocked, pages often render more quickly because the browser never wastes time fetching and parsing ad content.
- Lower CPU usage: The browser’s rendering engine has less JavaScript to execute.
If you’ve got some spare hardware or a virtual machine host like Proxmox, setting up AdGuard Home is a weekend project with long-term gains. You’ll also need to adjust your router’s DHCP settings to hand out the AdGuard Home instance as the DNS server. The official documentation walks you through it.
For those who don’t want to self-host, AdGuard also offers a public DNS service with ad blocking (dns.adguard-dns.com), but you lose the customization and local control.
What to do now if the headline fooled you
If you read that MakeUseOf article and rushed to spin up a Proxmox VM, don’t panic when you only see a few hundred MB freed. That’s the expected result. Here’s how to verify your savings:
- Baseline measurement: Before making any changes, open Task Manager on Windows, note the browser’s memory usage with your typical tab load, and record the total system memory consumption.
- Switch: Set up AdGuard Home and change your DNS settings, then restart your browser with the same tabs (or without the ad blocker extension).
- Compare: Check Task Manager again. The difference is your real-world saving.
You can also use tools like free -m on Linux or Resource Monitor on Windows to get a more granular view.
If your savings are smaller than expected, remember that AdGuard Home doesn’t eliminate all types of browser memory use. Content-heavy websites, web apps like Google Docs, and complex single-page applications still demand significant RAM. DNS filtering just removes the ad-related bloat.
The bottom line
AdGuard Home is a powerful tool that can meaningfully reduce your browser’s memory footprint—but it’s not a magic bullet. The 500MB reclaimed on the MakeUseOf writer’s machine is a realistic, useful gain. The 2GB figure in the headline? That’s clickbait math.
Before you rebuild your home network based on a headline, check the fine print. In this case, the fine print shows that sometimes the best savings come from understanding what you’re actually measuring.