I Rewrote Our Scraper with asyncio. My CTO Thought I Added Servers.

Here's the story. Last week, the product manager dropped a requirement: we needed to fetch real-time market data from 200 sources, refresh every 10 seconds, and keep latency under 2 seconds. I looked at the existing code — synchronous requests fetching one by one. A full round took 14 seconds, CPU usage was below 5%, but all the time was wasted waiting on network I/O. The classic Python solution: asyncio. I spent an afternoon rewriting the core of the scraper. After deployment, QPS jumped from 2