An adaptive hybrid polling technique combines an interrupt mode with a polling mode, and is based on outstanding input/output (OIO) determination to improve I/O performance and to save processor cycles. The OIO includes two types of I/O commands: (1) I/O commands submitted to storage devices for processing, and (2) I/O commands completed by the storage devices but not yet acknowledged by host software. The adaptive hybrid polling technique involves two phases to determine when to poll based on current OIO commands. In the first phase, a determination is made whether there is an adequate number of the first type of OIO commands to prepare for polling. In the second phase, a determination is made whether there is an adequate number of the second type of OIS commands to activate polling.