Python Concurrency with asyncio

1 Getting to know asyncio

This chapter covers

• What asyncio is and the benefits it provides
• Concurrency, parallelism, threads, and processes
• The global interpreter lock and the challenges it poses to concurrency
• How non-blocking sockets can achieve concurrency with only one thread
• The basics of how event-loop-based concurrency works

Many applications, especially in today’s world of web applications, rely heavily on I/O (input/output) operations. These types of operations include downloading the contents of a web page from the internet, communicating over a network with a group of microservices, or running several queries together against a database such as MySQL or Postgres. A web request or communication with a microservice may take hundreds ...