IO is blocking within that request. There's no way around that. The difference between sync and async is that with the latter, the event loop from the blocking

IO is blocking within that request. There's no way around that. The difference between sync and async is that with the latter, the event loop from the blocking request is freed up to handle other requests, which is where the performance gain is. If there's only a single request, then sync and async are going to look largely the same from the outside. However if there's thousands of requests, async is going to do much better.