> you could handle multiple requests at the same time To be fair to Python and the GIL, it's totally capable of parallelizing requests when most of the work is

> you could handle multiple requests at the same time To be fair to Python and the GIL, it's totally capable of parallelizing requests when most of the work is network-bound, which is probably the common case. And when the work is CPU-bound, but the CPU-intensive part is written in C, it's also possible for C to release the GIL. So it's really only "heavy computational work directly in Python" programs that are affected by this. (On the other hand, Python applications do naturally expand to look like this over time...)