> been reading the select(2) man pages and it mentions poll(2) > being more efficient in most cases. this makes it obvious to > discard the use of select(2) in writing new servers.
select requires that you set up a bit array correctly. but often people just use a fd_set, and cause a variety of strange buffer overflow cases as soon as their fd's happen to be greater than the bit size of the fd_set. the kernel has to iterate over these bit arrays a few times. for everyone involved, poll is just plain cheaper. finally, go look at the latest commit to lib/libc/net/res_send.c to see how much easier poll() is to use. > i've come across some performance benchmarks which is trying > to use kqueue(2). shrug. performance is only a small part of the whole. > the question is, which one is more useful when writing new servers? > kqueue or poll? use poll. it is easier to use -- the behaviours are less surprising. it is also much more portable. everyone has select and poll, and quite honestly poll() is a better select(), even if it came out of AT&T.
