| You are 100% correct. For the types of applications built with Django, async is actually more of a hinderance than a benefit. Async I/O can create massive back pressure in a distributed system. A simple example would be a web service that gets a massive influx of traffic (organic or DDoS, doesn't matter). If the web service is using async I/O to manage database connections with an unlimited connection pool (often the default) then it will happily accept all incoming requests and push all of that pressure onto the database. The database gets overwhelmed because it's inherited all of that traffic. The database starts refusing connections not just to the web service but any service that connects to the database. And boom, you have system wide outage. Obviously the database should guard against this kind of overwhelming traffic but that's often thought about last. Diagnosing the problem becomes a lot harder since your bottleneck is further downstream. It gets messy. Synchronous services on the other hand create a nice throttle. Your Django app is never going to achieve the kind of throughput that your database will. So, by design, your Django app will get overwhelmed first because it won't accept new connections (eg: maybe it runs out of memory). That being said I still think it makes sense for Django to support it. Not for a chat app, but say... web sockets. You may want a websocket connection that pushes notifications back to a single-page-app. The notifications will contain a bunch of contextual data that the Django framework provides easy access to (think ORM, templates, etc). Obviously you could build the websocket thing as a separate service but then you lose all the goodies that Django provides to you. |