From what I've seen, it's a common convention with game development to do non-blocking networking and update your network state every tick of your update loop.

From what I've seen, it's a common convention with game development to do non-blocking networking and update your network state every tick of your update loop. It fits in nicely with how everything else works in your game loop, and means you don't need to deal with marshalling data to/from a dedicated thread.