[doomrobo]

I think the only viable (in terms of portability) alternative is poll. There's a pretty good comparison of the two written by the author of cURL [0]. But essentially it's the same speed and doesn't have a hard-coded FD limit, but it runs on fewer platforms.

[0] http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/poll-vs-select.html

[electrum]

I sent patches in for curl about 10 years ago to switch from select to poll to get around the 1024 FD limit (which was a problem for multi-threaded servers that handled many sockets).

[baruch]

I like epoll over poll because you don't need a central point in your application that knows about all FDs, each component can manage it's own FDs registration with the OS.