Well I was going to drop to IDS instead of IPS and that’s good enough for home use. The load numbers on the host were 2 full cores used but that’s the NIC doing paravirtualizarion crap there. In bare metal, top shows nothing but the fans do spin up so it’s not telling me the whole story.

I think swapping to an i350 nic will help but I’m not certain if it will really help enough.