What does the "async" attribute on policies do?

[jonesfloyd]

On policies, one of the attributes on the root element is "async". The docs say it's for internal optimization only. Should this attribute be ignored? Left at the default of "false"? If not, how should it be used?

[adas · Accepted solution]

@Floyd Jones

I think its a bit of a misnomer. When we say async, it doesn't mean the policy would be executed asynchronously. The internal optimisation that it refers to, if I were to explain that in layman's term - the policy execution is off-loaded to a different thread, while the thread serving the request is free to pickup additional request and come back to the worker thread once the processing is complete. In certain cases, it makes sense to set it to true, but largely it can be left as default. I agree that it would be good to document this in our docs so that its clear to the proxy developers.