If it's still running on more than a single core, and your students want it to go faster, aligning the work to cpus will almost certainly be useful.

I saw you mentioned windows development elsewhere. You might be interested to know that Microsoft pionered Receive Side Scaling and Send Side Scaling. If you try your proxy out on Windows, be sure to hook into those systems there.

The less work your proxy does, the more important avoiding cross core communication is.

Pin threads to cores, and make sure threads different cores aren’t writing to the same 64 or 128 byte block. Lookup “false sharing”