Alan Bateman : Weblog: "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. "

This is great. Blackdown has had epoll support for a while now but I've not used it.