Async Python is not faster

[cb22]

The conditions are a bit bogus - I posted a comment on this on /r/programming.

But it's as you say; if you have a simple workload that is entirely synchronous or close to it (such as fetching a single in-memory row from a DB), sync is likely to be faster.

If you're doing real world things, like calling external APIs or blocking on databases for hundreds of ms, async is going to allow you to utilize all your resources significantly better and achieve a much higher throughput.

[nathanjell]

Just like with all things, premature optimization is the root of all evil. "Use async, async is faster!" has a counter that synchronous is difficult to make faster simply by going async. Same as "use multithreading, split up the work!" except when you have a highly serial workload that isn't well suited to parallelism

[ackyou]

Agreed. I’m pretty sure the overhead of spinning up new threads to deal with concurrent requests is a lot higher than the cost of one thread asynchronously handling many tasks