Why is my asyncio loop blocking?

I've answered this at least six times in the last month and I don't know what your problem is, but it's always a blocking call somewhere. Either you have time.sleep() buried in some helper function that got imported as a side effect, or you're

Probably running a sync call inside an async def. Check for any time.sleep or requests calls

The most common culprits:

1. **time.sleep() instead of await asyncio.sleep(). The former blocks the entire thread; the latter yields control back to the loop for other tasks.

2. Synchronous I/O. Doing requests.get() or reading a large file with open().read() inside an async function stops everything else until it finishes. Use httpx (async client) or aiofiles.

3. CPU-bound work in the loop. A heavy computation like sorting 10M items will block every other task while running. Offload to a thread/process:

await loop.run_in_executor(None, my_blocking_func, *args)

1. Nested loops or blocking calls in event handler callbacks. If you're using asyncio alongside threading, the interaction can introduce deadlocks and blockages that are hard to trace

wait... so if i have a sync function like time.sleep(5) inside await, it stops everything?? that sounds crazy how does asyncio even work then? is there some kind of queue system where other tasks keep running while one waits? and what do you call the thing when you accidentally block the loop -- blocking or something else? can i just wrap my sync calls in a threadpool somehow or is there a cleaner way. i'm so lost thank u very much for this thread