[bob1029]

> I'd recommend people take the simple approach of using async/await at the application layer and only change that approach if profiling demonstrates that it's becoming a performance bottleneck.

Despite some of the things I presented in my original comment, I absolutely agree with this. There are only a few extreme cases where async/await simply can't get the job done. These edge cases are usually explicitly discovered up front. It's rare to accidentally stumble into one of these ultra-low-latency problem spaces in most practical business applications.

[DoctorOW]

Honestly if you're in the situation where it comes down to individual CPU clock cycles I can't imagine C# (or similar Java, Go, etc.) being useful at that point. Too much going on that's not in the view of the developer.

[bob1029]

Some of the highest throughput systems on earth are written in either Java or C#.

Check out the LMAX disruptor sometime. Throughput rates measured in hundreds of millions of serialized events per second are feasible in these languages if you are clever with how you do things.