Just so people know that vertx is pretty capable :) Though I'm sure no one in this forum doubts it :p
Been looking at building a custom proxy or use nginx as a proxy.
I wrote my proxy using vertx-1.3.1 though I will be switching to 2.1M1
The numbers are on par. So I have to say pretty impressive.
Although I will probably use nginx because of the load balancing and reverse proxy features.
Though been using vertx for everything else http :)
Created a vertx 2.1 http application cache backed by EHCache and have been able to test up to 90,000 request/responses per second (16 core hyper-threaded server vertx -instances 32) at 2ms response times (this includes network time) and I'm sure it can do more, I ran out of client machines (1000 JMeter users spread over 5 client machines)
The same vertx application can do about 50,000 request/responses per second on a 4 core server.
The application is simple. Receive request, store it to cache (no log to disk), reply with "Added". Same goes for getting the cache value.
Vertx and Java perform pretty damn good if you ask me :)