epoll / kqueue is a good thought. That also makes me think of scatter/gather i/o (readv/writev), though I can't remember if we ever really saw big gains from i

epoll / kqueue is a good thought. That also makes me think of scatter/gather i/o (readv/writev), though I can't remember if we ever really saw big gains from it like we do from epoll. One other improvement worth calling out is that /dev/random (or substitute your RNG method of choice) is a thousandfold better now than it was in the 90s, though Linux has a big wart with entropy pool exhaustion. BSD leading the way there from what I understand, having an RNG that Just Works. This isn't just an invisible implementation detail, it means application developers can request and use random data without a bunch of "just-in-case" bit shuffling like discarding lower bits.