Interesting. Reminds me of when I worked on the Zeus Web Server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus_Web_Server

It was a static content focused poll-based (might have had epoll too) web server written in non-STL C++ which dramatically outperformed multi-threaded Apache. I remember it had a "stat cache" to reduce the number of syscalls made, and a nice set of string classes for passing around substrings of e.g. HTTP headers.