Select
Noun · Development
Definitions
A system call (or its language-level equivalent like Go's `select`) that monitors multiple file descriptors or channels and blocks until one or more become ready for reading, writing, or have an exceptional condition — the classic I/O multiplexing primitive, largely superseded by `poll` and `epoll`/`kqueue` for high-fd-count workloads.
In plain English: A way for a program to watch many connections at once and react as soon as any one of them has data ready.
Example: "We hit the 1024 fd limit on select and had to switch to epoll to handle more concurrent connections."