Plurrrr

This is a quick guide to Python’s asyncio module and is based on Python version 3.8.

This week I was debugging a misbehaving Python program that makes significant use of Python’s asyncio. The program would eventually take very long periods of time to respond to network requests. My first suspicion was a CPU-heavy coroutine hogging the thread, preventing the socket coroutines from running, but an inspection with pdb showed this wasn’t the case. Instead, the program’s author had made a couple of fundamental mistakes using asyncio. Let’s discuss them using small examples.

This article intends to be helpful for those who are already command line (CLI) users. Complete beginners are of course encouraged to read on, even though they may not grasp all the advantages immediately and perhaps there is a lot of other more important things to learn when starting. On the other hand, I expect long time CLI users to already work similarly. I do hope they might also find interesting tricks to adopt.