I think you are right in all of the points that you make. Poll should be fine for a small number of connections, as you scale up though /dev/poll comes into its own.  I always recommend using /dev/poll really because there's never been a reason not to until now. I  should probably add the caveat that it depends on how many connections you want to support. I have done a lot of testing on the UltraSPARC-T1 and T2 systems and I gave up on poll very early on, as it just didn't scale anywhere near as well as /dev/poll when it came to thousands of concurrent users. We are also working on putting back a Solaris Event Ports implementation which may scale even better for very high numbers of connections, although the tests I've done so far only hint at this.

I'd join you in recommending to not use sendfilev with Solaris 10 currently, with OpenSolaris though you should be ok because as you say the bug(s) have been fixed there. We are trying to get the fixes back ported to Solaris 10. I'd really like to do some testing with sendfilev on OpenSolaris and see how it performs in terms of both raw performance and stability. I'm also recommending using writev as the network-backend for now and we actually chose that for the Coolstack distribution of Lighttpd.

Your config and data are really interesting, can I ask what your average response size is? and how many connections?

Amanda