The performance of async/await is very low when compared to similar code that implements similar functionality via iterators, such as Quora's asynq library (https://github.com/quora/asynq/tree/master/asynq).

Based on my benchmarks, asynq is almost twice as fast as async/await. 

I have found some performance hanging fruit when benchmarking (See attached GitHub PR).


$ time python batch_asyncio.py 

real	0m5.851s
user	0m5.760s
sys	0m0.088s
$ time python batch_asynq.py 

real	0m2.999s
user	0m2.900s
sys	0m0.076s