Whilst on my first SE Job Rotation to Mountain View, I noticed that Oracle was using poll(0,0,10) as a “cheap” sleep mechanism (it is, after all, cheaper than the usleep() SIGALRM dance). However, at that time Solaris had a clunky implementation of poll() which did not scale well (see below). My solution was to write an interposing shared library (something very new in those days) which mapped poll() onto nanosleep() for the sleep only case. We told our Oracle engineering contacts about what I had done, but heard nothing. About a year later I was running truss on Oracle, and noticed that they had implemented my recommendation.