I am skeptical that a multi-worker approach would in fact be beneficial if all of the data is coming in strictly from one TCP/IP port.   I am skeptical that the additional overhead of the approach that you suggest here might in fact just slow it down.   If the work that needs to be done upon receipt of any trap is “non-trivial,” then you might have one “listener” thread that does nothing more than toss the request into a queue for consumption by a second thread or pool of threads, leaving the listener free to process the traps as quickly as they arrive without waiting for any of them to be processed.   The latency of the system will be very consistent and very low, even under load.

Furthermore, there are several existing frameworks for building “all the necessary plumbing” – including the venerable POE and a variety of thread-safe queues.   Everything you might need to set up worker-pools, queues, and to manage the whole thing are already available in CPAN so that you will not start from scratch.