Patch: CPU efficiency, UDP support, and other changes

[Steven Grimm]

Great, I will of course be very interested in any feedback on the code. 
Apologies for the pain. I'm not really sure how I could have structured 
it to make it any easier to merge given the nature of the change. If you 
(or anyone else) have suggestions in that area, I can at least learn for 
next time even if it's too late for this particular change. Hopefully 
the stuff I was able to separate out into separate patches will at least 
make reviewing the changes a bit easier.

-Steve

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote:
> I'm actively working on reviewing/merging it.  It's a bit of a pain as a
> massive patch, but I'm doing my best.
>