A query on asynchronous response for Servlet request

Question

In context of Servlet request/response I read somewhere that:

Using a different thread to do work required by a request will, as you expect, allow the response to be sent immediately.

I am just wondering when a Servlet thread is handing over the actual processing to another thread then that means that it does not have the expected response with it at that point of time anyways, then what is the value in sending the immediate but meaningless response back to the browser?

Could someone please give me a valuable usecase for it.

Answer 1

That quote is talking about a scenario where you can return a meaningful response without actually finishing all the work required by the request. For instance you might upload a file to be processed and respond immediately with a processing ID, but pass the processing to another thread. Later on the client could make another request with that ID to find out if processing completed.

An asynchronous servlet scenario would hand off processing to another thread to do the work while blocking the request. But the blocked request would not tie up a servlet request thread during processing like a normal synchronous servlet request.

Suppose you had a single threaded processor and 10 requests were made at the same time. With a synchronous servlet that waited for the processing to finish, you'd have 10 blocked request threads + 1 processor thread. But with an asynchronous servlet, you'd have 0 blocked threads + 1 processor thread. That's a pretty significant gain.