After some benchmarking I've found that AsyncHttpClient (https://github.com/AsyncHttpClient/async-http-client) seems to be the most stable and scalable async http client out there as it's based on NIO and seems to scale very well during load. I compared it against OkHttp and Apache Async and it seems to perform really well when simulating a backend with latency.
Unfortunately I have not yet found any way to expose it as a Spring AsyncRestTemplate, making a migration in our existing codebase a pain.
Does anyone know of any good bridge to RestTemplate's using the library, or if otherwise, how to create an issue in the Spring project to include it among the other Async http client factories?