OS threads can be expensive, so libraries try to only create a few OS threads.

A “hot loop” (usually, I think, called a “tight loop”) is a loop that does a lot of work for a relatively large amount of time all at once. Things like “looping through a list of every building an Manhattan and getting the average price over two decades.”

With some code like networking, you end up having to wait on other parts of the computer besides the CPU often, for things like uploads and downloads.

“Asynchronous programming” tried to make it easy to keep the CPU busy doing helpful things, even while some of it’s jobs are stuck waiting on uploads/downloads/whatever. This keeps the program efficient, because it can do a little bit of many tasks at once instead of having to complete each task entirely before moving on to the next.

The problem comes when you have a tight loop in a thread that is mostly expecting to be doing asynchronous work around I/O or networking. It is basically trying to juggle with one hand. The program can’t multitask as well, and you end up having to wait longer before it can start each piece of work you want.

If you're doing a hot loop, which may be synchronous, you will block the event loop attached to that OS thread, because a hot loop is presumably not yielding control until it is done.