I was reading up on Async servlets 3.1
It is said that the thread that sends the request is freed up when there is lot of time consuming operations to be done for e.g. fetching long list of data from the database.
I am not able to understand the benefit here because anyways there will be a new thread allocated to process the database connection and response processing even if the initial thread that was responsible for the request is freed.
So how is Async servlet more beneficial than thread per request model that we had earlier.