fwiw: i have a strong suspicion that the reason folks have reported seeing “Downloading” tasks for things like PEX more often than you’d otherwise expect is that the node ends up blocked waiting for an IO slot to check whether we actually need to download

That... would make sense; I saw this enough at times where I started watching network activity related to it and never saw any actual downloads

yea. it’s been an ongoing struggle to decide “how much” of any particular node to render. there are various points at which you can block and wait, and many of them should count as the task running (time spent actually downloading)… while others shouldn’t (time spent waiting to check the cache to see whether you should download).

I thought tokio just parked threads on IO waits so a pool could be shared among various thread-like things (fibers?)

yea, tokio tasks will be parked. but the “queue” implicitly represented by being parked is internal to tokio’s scheduler… would need to know internal details to figure out “how many tasks are parked waiting to run as spawn_blocking” essentially

in the end, it’s the curse of async, regardless of language 😉