I understand that netspeed just determines what proportion of requests get routed to you and is not a reflection of actual data usage. I have my netspeed set to 1Gbps (which is my VPS’s actual advertised network speed) and I’m handling 1200-2000 qps without breaking a sweat (and yes, I understand that number of connections is a much bigger factor than throughput of bytes here), I’m nowhere near saturating my connection. Should I crank my listed netspeed higher?
Hi @robinpie
Welcome to the community.
Should you crank up your netspeed - That is entirely up to you. As you say your system is nowhere near the link or processing limits then sure go for it and increase or decrease the speed to whatever you think your system will handle.
If you have 1Gbps netspeed and receiving about 1200 ~ 2000 qps the I would guess your system is in Europe or North America. If you are wanting to see a busier system then feel free to get a VPS in some parts of Asia where setting the netspeed to 512Kbps could get your system swamped with over 50Mbps of network traffic and about 30k ~ 40k qps.
Fun times 
If you set it higher then your real speed, you have to monitor it very closely.
As you may attract very big spikes that may cause your provider to see it as DOS-attacks and limit the port or even close it.
Before you do that, I would inform the provider that you do. Better to ask upfront then to be marked as abusive behavior.
If they agree, go for it! 
I set mine to 2 gigs and im getting about 350k requests per min to 400k requests per min currently.