It turns out that #733 introduced quite the performance regression on various http benchmarks, > 50% on https://github.com/stjepang/minihttp/ I have tracked the issue down to this commit: https://github.com/async-rs/async-std/commit/f9607768461242b129454256ec4528c680c9a946 If I revert it, all tests still pass and performance improves to be even slightly faster than 1.5. @k-nasa could you shed some light what exactly you were trying to achieve in this commit and why you introduced it?