async

• Especially for IO intensive applications

• Reading from a file, but many disks actually cannot do parallel reading or writing so there is not much gain. Unless we have several disks in the computer or unless the disks are mounted from some other devices via nfs or Samba.

• Network client operations such as downloading pages from the Internet or accessing APIs through the network.

• Network server operations where our system needs to handle multiple operations that involve network operations.

• Accessing databases (via the network), which in reality is just accessing APIs over some protocol. (Which is probably not http.)

• context switching

• Cooperative multitasking vs Pre-emptive multitasking (interleaving or time-slicing)

  • Even in the pre-emptive case a thread can give up control by waiting for some input (network) or by calling sleep.

• Using async needs a runtime aka. main loop. There are several crates providing async runtime and tokio is the most popular one.