In the pgsql driver I depend on the fact that I can peek(0) with zero delay. Setting the minimum to one millisecond is rather desastrous for performance.

What paranoia is your patch supposed to aid? The old 7.8 code *did* a poll(0) if explicitly told to do so. Please keep it that way.

The proper paranoia fix would be leaving the timeout = 1, even though I consider that paranoia unnecessary.