skywatch | Magic cloud alerting system in a self-contained command

The purpose of async and await is to make things easy. But just like everything that makes things easy, it comes with a cost of having full control over what's going on. Here, it's really a cost of asynchronous programming in general. The point of asynchronous programming is to free up the current thread so that the current thread can go off and do something else. But if something else is done on the current thread, then the continuation of what you were doing must wait until that is done. (i.e. What comes after the await may not happen instantaneously after the task completes)

So while asynchronous programming will help overall performance (like increasing the overall throughput performance of a web app), but will actually hurt the performance of any one specific task. If every millisecond counts to you, you might be able to do the low-level tasks yourself, like creating a Thread (if this really needs to be run on a separate thread).

Here is a simple example that demonstrates this: