A little background, we are currently using vert.x for our project, but after first online traffic tests,
we found that their client code does not satisfy our requirements.

Btw. is it the case that for client code, that vert.x drops back to threads+synchronous I/O?

I just briefly read a bit about it and it seems like it uses the asynchronous I/O only for handling requests and provides thread pools with traditional I/O for anything on top of that.