Network board optimization and manipulation

Hi guys, hope you all had a nice holiday season!

I’m doing a research about high performance systems but I have little knowledge on network or tcp communication so I don’t know exactly where am I supposed to look at. Here is my situation in detail:

I have 3 servers with intel(r) Ethernet 10g 2P x520 and there are 5 different (software and fpga) applications connected to all three sending tcp messages. I’m trying to creat two scenarios:

1 - in one application send a stream of messages optimized for that specific board and therefore processed faster than all the others

2 - in another application send a stream of messages that slows down the processing of the messages and therefore making it and all other applications underperform

I don’t know what configs I should be looking at to achieve that, so I’d appreciate some guidance!

Thanks in advance.