Unsure about network (if it's true that it's on a separate thread, perhaps it's because network operations take cpu time even when readied asynchronously--e.g. even after you select/[e]poll to determine what events to trigger next, the actual read/write/sendfile/whatever ops do take a little time). However, filesystem IO is performed in threads in libuv on many platforms, due to the unavailability of stable async IO capabilities.