What category of tasks does processing network requests belong to?

Handling network requests falls into the category of input-output (I/O-bound tasks). These tasks involve waiting for data from external sources — such as the network, disk, or database — and typically require efficient management of asynchrony and parallelism.

In Python, asynchronous libraries like asyncio, aiohttp, or multithreading/multiprocessing are often used to improve performance.

Example of an asynchronous HTTP server using aiohttp:

from aiohttp import web

async def handle(request):
    return web.Response(text="Hello, world")

app = web.Application()
app.add_routes([web.get('/', handle)])

web.run_app(app)

Thus, handling network requests is an I/O-bound task that requires efficient management of waiting for data.