Overall, I'm extremely happy with my configuration. I have a 7th Gen 4 core i5 (3.5Ghz), with two SSDs in RAID 1. I also have 32GB of DDR4 RAM. I'm running pfSense on Hyper-V, giving it access to all 4 CPUs and 8GB of RAM. Using PIA OpenVPN, on a 1 GB fiber connection, I'm getting ~800MB/s, both up and down (using connections close to my location).

Where I'm stumped is CPU usage. I tested 4 PCs at once with a speed test. No matter what I do, CPU(s) peak at 50%. My best guess is that pfSense is only able to utilize 2 cores. If this is a limitation of Hyper-V, I would be fine putting pfSense directly on the hardware w/o Hyper-V, but that'll be a significant project. So, I don't want to do it w/o having some idea if it will help.

Can anyone think of a reason why CPU usage will not go above 50% on a Hyper-V pfSense firewall running on an i5 with all 4 cores (None virtual)?

FYI v2.4.3 has done wonders. Hyper-V now recognizes both hardware encryption and compression. I'm extremely happy with that.

(One time, CPU hit 54%, but I suspect that was just a small miscalculation).

Thanks in advance for any thoughts, advice or simply brainstorming.