If you are coming from another async framework that does not work in the way described above and you are used to defining trivial compute-only *path operation functions* with plain `def` for a tiny performance gain (about 100 nanoseconds), please note that in **FastAPI** the effect would be quite opposite. In these cases, it's better to use `async def` unless your *path operation functions* use code that performs blocking <abbr title="Input/Output: disk reading or writing, network communi...