> I remember saying “something” will block eventually no matter what… anything from the buffer being full on the NIC to your cpu being at anything less than 100%.
Nope. You can go async all the way down, right to the electrical signals if you want. We usually impose some amount of synchronous clocking/polling for sanity, at various levels, but you don't have to; the world is not synchronised, the fastest way to respond to a stimulus will always be to respond when it happens.
> Does it shake out to any real advantage?
Of course it does - did you miss the whole C10K discussions 20+ years ago? Whether it matters for your business is another question, but you can absolutely get a lot more throughput by being nonblocking, and if you're doing request-response across the Internet you generally can't afford not to.
Nope. You can go async all the way down, right to the electrical signals if you want. We usually impose some amount of synchronous clocking/polling for sanity, at various levels, but you don't have to; the world is not synchronised, the fastest way to respond to a stimulus will always be to respond when it happens.
> Does it shake out to any real advantage?
Of course it does - did you miss the whole C10K discussions 20+ years ago? Whether it matters for your business is another question, but you can absolutely get a lot more throughput by being nonblocking, and if you're doing request-response across the Internet you generally can't afford not to.