Anti-Virus is the second most likely Threat Prevention blade to cause performance and/or high CPU utilization issues after IPS. Anti-Bot is relatively low overhead and is probably not causing your issue.
Generally, you don't want traffic travelling between high-speed internal networks to be scanned with Anti-Virus unless you have a quite beefy firewall. There are two primary ways to ensure this does not happen, by creating a blade-based (not protection-based) exception or by adjusting the profile-based properties for the Anti-Virus blade which has many performance-impacting settings you should check. Here are the relevant pages from my Gateway Performance Optimization Course covering these topics which you should find helpful, the blade-based exception example shown is for IPS but will work for Anti-Virus too:
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Attend my 60-minute "Be your Own TAC: Part Deux" Presentation
Exclusively at CPX 2025 Las Vegas Tuesday Feb 25th @ 1:00pm