Which technology is more effective for processing a large volume of network requests: asynchronous programming or multitasking?

To handle a large volume of network requests asynchronously is usually more effective than traditional multithreading (threads or processes).

Why:

• Asynchronous programming allows not to block the thread while waiting for I/O operations (e.g., network requests), reducing context switch overhead.
• It enables processing thousands of concurrent connections with less resource consumption.

In Python, this is implemented via asyncio and async/await, which is especially useful for I/O-bound tasks.

Example of an asynchronous server in Python:

import asyncio

async def handle_client(reader, writer):
    data = await reader.read(100)
    message = data.decode()
    writer.write(data)
    await writer.drain()
    writer.close()

async def main():
    server = await asyncio.start_server(handle_client, '127.0.0.1', 8888)
    async with server:
        await server.serve_forever()

asyncio.run(main())

Thus, asynchronous programming is better suited for scalable handling of many network requests.