pfSense Slow WAN - HELP PLZ

Hello everyone!

First of all, massive thank you for letting me into this community! I’m excited to be here, to learn, and to help others where I can!

So, I’ve been having an issue that I need help troubleshooting. I’m honestly not sure where to start!
My issue is that my LAN is getting Gigabit Speeds (tested with iperf3) but my WAN slows down to ~300Mbps. I have Gigabit internet through Cox. I am able to get a IP for my WAN, and internet access does work! I just can’t seem to figure out why I’m getting such a significant difference between my LAN and WAN interfaces. My CPU/RAM usage never seems high.

Setup is as follows:(please let me know if I need to include more)

Dell Inspiron 660 mobo
Intel I5-2500K CPU
XCP-NG Hypervisor
4 - Gigabit network cards(Intel onboard, and then 3 additional TP-Link TG-3468)
16GB 1600Mhz RAM - 6Gb dedicated to pfSense

Could this issue be directly due to pfSense being visualized? I DO have XCP-NG guest tools installed on pfsense.
I have changed which NIC I use for LAN/WAN - seems to make no difference.
I have configured my settings as per suggestions made online, disable offloading and so on, makes no difference.

What am I missing? Is the firewall making my speeds this slow? when I use my Cox router, I can get gigabit speeds no problem, so not a cable issue.

Please assist - I’m honestly not sure what to do. I’ve rebuilt the pfSense box now several times over to try and fix the speed issues.

Thank you everyone in advance!!

Read though this and make sure you have disable tx checksum offloading on the virtual xen interfaces of the VM and that might work.

Personally I recommend not virtualizing pfsense because there are a lot of factors such as what NIC cards you have that can cause issues. I only run a virtual version of pfsense for lab testing.

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