Moving to Python 3

I think you misread my post: I have a fixed number of FDs and a fixed number of threads. Each FD has a completely different purpose and protocol and so an event loop is not really practical. You have to get several different components of the system (which don't know of each other's existence) to work through a single event loop. Sure it's possible, but threads are a nice way to isolate them.

Of course in the general case you are right, a service like a webserver should try to reduce the number of threads. But also in the special case of CPython it's pointless to use more threads, since the GIL prevents more than one thread running at a time anyway.