@Async in Spring Boot

Lorenzo Orlando
3 min readOct 6, 2024

Spring makes it super easy to execute methods asynchronously in the background using the @Async annotation. This is helpful when you want to perform time-consuming operations (like sending emails, making external API calls, or processing large data) without blocking the main thread.

Why Use @Async?

  • Non-blocking operations: You can run heavy tasks in the background without blocking the user request.
  • Performance improvements: It allows you to parallelize tasks, reducing response time.
  • Clean and simple: You don’t need to deal with low-level threading or ExecutorService directly.

Example Scenario

Imagine you have a service that sends notification emails after a user registers. You don’t want the user to wait for the email to be sent before getting a response, so you can use @Async to send the email in the background.

Step-by-Step Example

1. Enable @Async in Your Application

To use @Async, you first need to enable it in your Spring Boot application by adding @EnableAsync in your main application class or a configuration class.

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import…

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