Isn't the answer to the problem of network load to run statsd locally on each server? I thought that was how it was normally deployed. Then you can have the local statsd write to graphite/carbon directly, or to a second layer of statsd if you want to do additional aggregation.
That'd still have you going through the kernel on every event to handle the UDP packet, keeping in userspace is more efficient (on the order of 10ns of CPU).
