Connections creation and management
Sometime overall network speed can be hampered by connections creation and management speed. While this is rarely a problem for home and small office, it can be the case when you have some high-load, high-access web servers behind you firewall and / or you are using some client software that use lots of connections (eg: Microsoft Outlook clients connecting to an Exchange server for push notifications).
For testing connection creation and management speed I used the trusted Apache Benchmark, with Apache itself showing the default RHEL test page:
Mmm... this was an interesting run. Note how our RB750GL has at best 1/3 of the switch-only connections speed. As expected, regular expression matching and VPN are some very processing intensive things.