Super Slow OpenVPN

[brnogu]

Hello everyone. I've spent the last months reading lots and lots of posts about OpenVPN being slow.

Previously I was using an Asus router as an OpenVPN Server and I was getting super slow speeds (Around 16 Mb/sec)
It seemed fair since it was a very low powered device.

A few months after I've migrated to a VMware virtual machine running on a Intel i3 processor with 2 cores allocated and 1GB of RAM with PfSense.
I have tried multiple configurations but I'm getting the exact same speeds as when I was using the router (around 16Mb).

My connection speed is 1Gb Down and 200 Up. I'm not understanding why this is being so slow!

When I'm downloading a file through SAMBA I can see that CPU usage of the server remains around 3/4%.

My client is a Surface Pro 6 with an intel core i7. So the issue can't be on the client side. I'm also testing this being on the same city when a fast internet connection. On the client network the speed tests are around 200 down / 100 Up

I'm starting to get crazy because it doesn't make any sense to me and I've decided to ask for some help directly from the experts

[garypharr]

I wonder if it has something to do with encryption. When I first implemented OPENVPN on our PFSense router [using the software on an old PC] i was having issues with speed. After doing some research I discovered that the CPU of the PC did not have any of the hardware crypto supported in PFSense. I then bought a cheap but 'newer' PC with an Intel I5 CPU and speed was never an issue again. Here is what I have now:
CPU Type Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570 CPU @ 3.40GHz
Current: 3400 MHz, Max: 3401 MHz
4 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 4 core(s)
AES-NI CPU Crypto: Yes (active)
Hardware crypto AES-CBC,AES-XTS,AES-GCM,AES-ICM