I was testing a RAG ingestion pipeline and noticed something painful: ingesting a single document took nearly 50 seconds. Checking the metrics revealed that the CPU was doing almost nothing. The app wasn't compute-bound — it was simply sitting idle, waiting for sequential HTTP network round-trips to return. By converting the blocking embedding module into an asynchronous workflow, processing time dropped from 49.61 seconds to 1.56 seconds with zero infrastructure changes. ...