Isn't that why gunicorn(+gevent) was implemented and does the switching behind the scenes w/o waiting that api call to finish? Is there a good reason I should manually "await" network calls from now on?
Yes; gevent does also fix this problem. But it also gives you a lot of new problems when running all requests async. In my experience mostly with views that (in some specific calls, i.e for a specific customer) keep the cpu tied up, for example serializing a lot of data. Random other requests will be stuck waiting and seem slow while it is a lot more difficult to find out which view is the actual problem.
I have deployed applications both under gevent and sync workers in gunicorn and would personally never use gevent again, especially in bigger projects. It makes the behavior of the application unpredictable.
It does have the same problem. Standard library CPU-heavy functions are not generally async-friendly. You'll be stuck blocking for that 500kb JSON file to serialize.
I have deployed applications both under gevent and sync workers in gunicorn and would personally never use gevent again, especially in bigger projects. It makes the behavior of the application unpredictable.