Make select based loop as responsive as possible

Question

This thread will be very responsive to network activity but can be guaranteed to process the message queue only as often as 100 times a second. I can keep reducing the timeout but after a certain point I will be busy-waiting and chewing up CPU. Is it true that this solution is about as good as I'll get without switching to another method?

// semi pseudocode
while (1) {
  process_thread_message_queue(); // function returns near-instantly
  struct timeval t;
  t.tv_sec = 0;
  t.tv_usec = 10 * 1000; // 10ms = 0.01s
  if (select(n,&fdset,0,0,t)) // see if there are incoming packets for next 1/100 sec
  {
    ... // respond with more packets or processing
  }
}

Answer 1

It depends on what your OS provides for your. On Windows you can wait for a thread message and a bunch of handles simultaneously using MsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx. This solves your problem. On other OS you should have something similar.