What are the differences between poll and select?

Question

I am referring to the POSIX standard select and poll system C API calls.

Answer 1

The select() call has you create three bitmasks to mark which sockets and file descriptors you want to watch for reading, writing, and errors, and then the operating system marks which ones in fact have had some kind of activity; poll() has you create a list of descriptor IDs, and the operating system marks each of them with the kind of event that occurred.

The select() method is rather clunky and inefficient.

1. There are typically more than a thousand potential file descriptors available to a process. If a long-running process has only a few descriptors open, but at least one of them has been assigned a high number, then the bitmask passed to select() has to be large enough to accomodate that highest descriptor — so whole ranges of hundreds of bits will be unset that the operating system has to loop across on every select() call just to discover that they are unset.

2. Once select() returns, the caller has to loop over all three bitmasks to determine what events took place. In very many typical applications only one or two file descriptors will get new traffic at any given moment, yet all three bitmasks must be read all the way to the end to discover which descriptors those are.

3. Because the operating system signals you about activity by rewriting the bitmasks, they are ruined and are no longer marked with the list of file descriptors you want to listen to. You either have to rebuild the whole bitmask from some other list that you keep in memory, or you have to keep a duplicate copy of each bitmask and memcpy() the block of data over on top of the ruined bitmasks after each select() call.

So the poll() approach works much better because you can keep re-using the same data structure.

In fact, poll() has inspired yet another mechanism in modern Linux kernels: epoll() which improves even more upon the mechanism to allow yet another leap in scalability, as today's servers often want to handle tens of thousands of connections at once. This is a good introduction to the effort:

http://scotdoyle.com/python-epoll-howto.html

While this link has some nice graphs showing the benefits of epoll() (you will note that select() is by this point considered so inefficient and old-fashioned that it does not even get a line on these graphs!):

http://lse.sourceforge.net/epoll/index.html

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Update: Here is another Stack Overflow question, whose answer gives even more detail about the differences:

Caveats of select/poll vs. epoll reactors in Twisted