Talk:278: Black Hat Support

select() calls are used to poll sockets for activity (read, write and exceptions), and I suspect the issue was that the timeout value (which is specified as part of select()'s parameters) was set too high judging from the overall content; Web servers and clients alike would suffer considerable latency as a result of waiting too long for I/O ports to activate. Thus it's likely the Apache install was misconfigured somehow, since the default settings should be sufficient for most purposes (in my limited experience since I work solely with nginx these days).

I had this problem writing a server in PHP, and it took a while to get PHP (under Win32) to stop hogging my precious CPU cycles by successful application of nonblocking sockets and a short timeout parameter. Thokling (talk) 15:24, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

You are correct and I have modified the explanation. It could also be due to a loop polling a socket that will never be freed(a deadlock), this was my interpretation. 108.162.246.117 07:05, 1 November 2013 (UTC)