Stateless server

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A stateless server is a server that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request.

[edit] Advantages and Disadvantages

The stateless design simplifies the server design because there is no need to dynamically allocate storage to deal with conversations in progress. If a client dies in mid-transaction, no part of the system needs to be responsible for cleaning the present state of the server.

A disadvantage is that it may be necessary to include additional information in every request and this extra information will need to be interpreted by the server.

[edit] Examples

An example of a stateless server is a World Wide Web server. These take in requests in the form of URLs (which may be accompanied by client-side state-data such as cookies) which completely specify the required document and do not require any context or memory of previous requests.

Contrast this with a traditional FTP server which conducts an interactive session with the user. A request to the server for a file can assume that the user has been authenticated and that the current directory and file transfer mode have been set.

[edit] References

• This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

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