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Comment by euphetar | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, no. Despite all the supposed advantages of async, I haven't found a use for it. When it comes to web apps a nginx + uwsgi + a sync framework is an unbeatable combination. The only times I have used async were when I made website scrapers and telegram bots for And if I was to scrape websites now, I would just use scrapy. My favorite telegram bot framework is synchronous too.

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There are some use cases in web programming. For example, if a request handler (view, in Django's terminology) is in turn calling out some external endpoints, you don't want those external requests to block other requests to your API. For things like those, async is actually quite nice.

You can mix asynchronous code with Django?

You kick off an async task in celery or use some other way to keep track of it. Then return a key, and have your front end poll for status

There are things you can do to achieve async in Django. But I only used Django terminology because Django is more popular than other frameworks.

Are you talking about blocking other requests to the request handler or to external endpoints?

Because both can be solved in a sync server via thread pools.

It really depends on how responsive your endpoints are. If they're really slow (or slowly streaming data), you can probably do hundreds/thousands via thread pools. (depends how you do the dispatch / locking) You can go orders of magnitude higher with async. (as in epoll - specific async frameworks may have their own bottlenecks)

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