The problem is that all of select(2)'s competitors have a lot of problems as well. Because, as will be repeated below, I have no idea what I'm talking about, I

The problem is that all of select(2)'s competitors have a lot of problems as well. Because, as will be repeated below, I have no idea what I'm talking about, I will be citing a relatively independant source, namely, the libev documentation. -epoll: epoll is an absolute mess. Just read the manpage. Cantrill said it, and in this case he's right. But since Cantrill is hardly an independant souce, here's what the libev documentation has to say about epoll: >The epoll mechanism deserves honorable mention as the most misdesigned of the more advanced event mechanisms: mere annoyances include silently dropping file descriptors, requiring a system call per change per file descriptor (and unnecessary guessing of parameters), problems with dup, returning before the timeout value, resulting in additional iterations (and only giving 5ms accuracy while select on the same platform gives 0.1ms) and so on. The biggest issue is fork races, however - if a program forks then both parent and child process have to recreate the epoll set, which can take considerable time (one syscall per file descriptor) and is of course hard to detect. >Epoll is also notoriously buggy - embedding epoll fds should work, but of course doesn't, and epoll just loves to report events for totally different file descriptors (even already closed ones, so one cannot even remove them from the set) than registered in the set (especially on SMP systems). [...] >Epoll is truly the train wreck among event poll mechanisms, a frankenpoll, cobbled together in a hurry, no thought to design or interaction with others. Oh, the pain, will it ever stop... -kqueue: kqueue isn't epoll, which is a massive advantage. However, once again according to libev (I do like to site people who know what they're doing, because I don't), it's at least somewhat broken on every system other than NetBSD: it only works with sockets and pipes on FreeBSD, and on OSX it's totally broken. If this is wrong, or has been fixed, please let me know: I'd love that. -Eventports: according to libev (once again) eventports are probably the least broken: it's slower than select and poll on small scales, but scales up well. Apparently the interface is a bit quirky, and it has some problems ("The event polling function sometimes returns events to the caller even though an error occurred, but with no indication whether it has done so or not"), but it's a heck of a lot better than everything else. So yes, Solaris wins. Again. Dammit, Solaris: it's getting increasingly hard to argue with your fans, because the system is actually really nice.