@michmoor what would it take you 3 seconds to know if pihole is not answering, or unbound is not answering?
if dns is not working and I query unbound, and it works - its pretty much a given that pihole is the problem ;)
I don't recall pihole ever going down btw ;) And while some users report issues with unbound - I can not recall the last time I had any issues with it, mine never restarts, unless I do it on purpose sort of thing. Nor does it just stop.. Both have been pretty rock solid if you ask me.. Then again I am not loading 47 million things into dnsbl, nor do I forward, and sure and the hell if I did forward it wouldn't be doing it over tls nor would I be having dnssec set if I forwarded. And I don't register dhcp clients either, where unbound needs to restart every few minutes because some update to a dhcp client ;)
And my isp is pretty much rock solid..
I always have a cmd prompt open, it takes what 3 seconds to do a dig directly to pfsense IP vs the default dns of unbound.
I currently show unbound up for 12 hours, I made some adjustments this morning to my static reservations for some lightbulbs and needed to change some names, so unbound restarted. Other than my changes I pretty sure unbound would be running for the last 20 and half days.. which is the time pfsense has been up.