In some benchmarks that involve many small messages I've found that we spend a non-trivial amount of time in Tornado's IOStream code (see stack overflow question). I've become a bit curious about uvloop. One way to explore this would be to implement a Comm and Backend (see docs) for asyncio and then see how it performs both alone, and after installing uvloop as the default event loop.

cc @pitrou who may have some high-level guidance about whether or not this is a good idea and how best to implement this with asyncio, and @jcrist who might enjoy doing this work.