# Blocking vs Asynchronous REST

This demo calls the EBay WS API both synchronously and asynchronously, to obtain items matching each of the keywords passed on the query string. The time the request thread is held by the servlet is displayed in red for both.

By the use of Asynchronous Servlets and the Jetty Asynchronous client, the server is able to release the thread (green) while waiting for the response from Ebay. This thread goes back into the thread pool and can service many other requests during the wait. This greatly reduces the number of threads needed, which in turn greatly reduces the memory requirements of the server.

Press reload to see even better results after JIT and TCP/IP warmup!