To poll or epoll: that is the question

To poll or epoll: that is the question:

"One of the updates in build 59 of Mustang (JavaTM SE 6) is that the New I/O Selector implementation will use the epoll event notification facility when running on the Linux 2.6 kernel. The epoll event mechanism is much more scalable than the traditional poll when there are thousands of file descriptors in the interest set. The work done by poll depends on the size of the interest set whereas with epoll (like Solaris /dev/poll) the registration of interest is separated from the retrieval of the events. A lot has been written on the topic. The C10K problem has been documenting I/O frameworks and strategies for several years. One relatively recent paper on Comparing and Evaluating epoll, select, and poll Event Mechanisms makes it clear the workloads where epoll performs a lot better than poll.