> Would wildcard support in hosts files be too heavy for the performance needed? Can anyone explain me why wildcard support for blocklists would require more p

> Would wildcard support in hosts files be too heavy for the performance needed? Can anyone explain me why wildcard support for blocklists would require more performance? Assuming it's just basic wildcards, not full regex. Seems to me that 1) with wildcards you need to check less bytes per entry and 2) since the list itself will be shorter you need to check less entries. Do any of these filtering tools compile the list (offline) to a minimal state machine or a trie? That would probably max performance (and benefits from wildcards too).