My opinion for sump turnover is ... "as fast as you can afford".
Here's my reasoning,
Bio media is not single pass filtration. E.g Reverse Osmosis. Where the water only have 1 chance of passing through the media.
Bacteria will have higher efficiency when in higher waste concentration assuming carbon is not the limiting factor.
Eg. Both 100mg/l and 10mg/l of NH3 is passing through the same media with same flowrate. In terms of percentage NH3 removal, the 100mg/l will have a much higher efficiency than 10mg/l.
By introducing a higher flowrate, you are narrowing the gap towards perfect water circulation. The main idea is to bring higher concentration waste water(from main tank) to the bio media as fast as possible
Alot of pumps available in the market are rated at 0 head loss so you will not get the rated flowrate. Depending on the pump you use and headloss, flowrate can be reduced drastically to only 10-20%.
Biomedia and piping will clog overtime and that will reduce the flowrate further. So my opinion is, go for the highest flowrate and better quality pump.
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