Blocking operations wait until completion before returning control.

Non-blocking operations return immediately, allowing other work to continue.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Asynchronous means things can happen independently of the main program flow.

I/O Bound Tasks

Operations that spend most of their time waiting for input/output to complete.

Examples:

• Reading from or writing to files
• Network requests (API calls, database queries)
• User input

Characteristics:

• Spend more time waiting than computing
• Often have unpredictable completion times
• Don't fully utilize CPU resources

Concurrency Strategy:

• Async programming is ideal — single thread with event loop
• Can handle many concurrent operations with low overhead