Does the HTTP protocol handle requests synchronously?

The HTTP protocol itself does not specify whether request processing should be synchronous or asynchronous — this depends on the server and client implementation. In most modern server platforms (including Java), request processing occurs asynchronously or using multithreading to avoid blocking the main thread and to efficiently serve multiple requests.

For example, in Java servlets, each request is handled in a separate thread, allowing multiple clients to be served in parallel. Therefore, from the perspective of the HTTP protocol — requests can be processed either synchronously or asynchronously, but in practice, an asynchronous or multithreaded approach is more commonly used to improve performance.