Take a look at https://github.com/concurrencykit/ck and https://github.com/microsoft/mimalloc, it will fit well for a zero-copy and mem aligned reverse proxy. Also, if you want to add a DDoS protection and more advanced L4 stuff check out https://docs.ebpf.io/ebpf-library/libxdp/libxdp/

Yeah, the plan was to apply optimizations at the other levels, then we will go to allocators. Studying the allocators rn with my students, the previous post in the blog was about custom allocator on the Zig lang.