Consider a server application that is listening on a specific port to get data from clients. In synchronous receiving, while the server is waiting to receive data from a client, if the stream is empty the main thread will block until the request for data is satisfied. Hence, the server cannot do anything else until it receives data from the client. If another client attempts to connect to the server at that time, the server cannot process that request because it is blocked on the first client. This behavior is not acceptable for a real-world application where we need to support multiple clients at the same time.
In asynchronous communication, while the server is listening or receiving data from a client, it can still process connection requests from other clients as well as receive data from those clients. When a server is receiving asynchronously, a separate thread (at the OS level) listens on the socket and will invoke a callback function when a socket event occurs. This callback function in turn will respond and process that socket event.