The hardware:

modem Netgear CM1000

Proxmox host HPML10 8 Core Xeon E3-1246 v3 / 32GB Mem

boot disk 112 GB SSD / 2 x 8TB WD Red for ZFS Storage

10Gtek for Intel 82576 dedicated to Proxmox

pfSense 4 cores / 4 Gig Mem & 1 Gig swap

virtio marginally better vs e1000 Network Device

Did you use pcie passthrough for your NIC card for the pfsense vm? If not, you can try this.

This is the one I found and it works great in my Dell 5050.

1.25G Gigabit Ethernet Converged Network Adapter (NIC) for Intel 82576 Chip, Dual RJ45 Copper Ports, PCI Express 2.0 X1, Compare to Intel E1G42ET