The standard select and poll syscalls perform just fine if you only have a handful of sockets. Heck, they perform just fine as long as a nontrivial proportion of your sockets are ready at any given time.
The place you need kqueue and epoll is when most of your connections are idle -- IRC servers and web servers with large keepalive times. But the vast majority of processes are not IRC or web servers.
The place you need kqueue and epoll is when most of your connections are idle -- IRC servers and web servers with large keepalive times. But the vast majority of processes are not IRC or web servers.