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Many random bits of the standard library were originally written using select.select. This is an ancient API that is available everywhere, but these days you'd be hard pressed to find _any_ system that does not implement the superior poll() API which does not suffer from the file descriptor limits problem of select().
A select.select() work-a-like should be possible to write that is implemented using poll.poll().
I am attaching my untested work in progress version of something like that as I don't have time to work on this further at the moment. Someone else can pick it up if desired. (sorry about the code being in Google style rather than PEP-8)