[staticassertion]

I think a missing piece here is that you think that Rust won't download a file faster than Python but it absolutely can. This seems to just be a misconception people have about IO, like "download a file" is a thing that exists wholly outside of your process.

[tinco]

I know it can, but it can't download it faster than the network card can write it into its buffers. That's the part I would count as the 50ms that both can't improve upon.

[staticassertion]

Of course. But why would that matter if Python can't get there to begin with? You're not going to hit NIC bottlenecks with Python, not without a ton of work and tradeoffs at least.