The standard select and poll syscalls perform just fine if you only have a handful of sockets. Heck, they perform just fine as long as a nontrivial proportion

The standard select and poll syscalls perform just fine if you only have a handful of sockets. Heck, they perform just fine as long as a nontrivial proportion of your sockets are ready at any given time. The place you need kqueue and epoll is when most of your connections are idle -- IRC servers and web servers with large keepalive times. But the vast majority of processes are not IRC or web servers.