This avoids a vulnerability in tokio (#3085). The major version updates
of both actix-web and actix-rt required some signficant changes. Chief
among those, it turns out we were relying on actix-rt to run the
HttpServer in a different thread from the rest of the test, so that we
could talk to it from sync code in the test thread. This no longer
works, so the sync code is now run in a dedicated thread with
`actix_rt::task::spawn_blocking`.