A stateless server is a server that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request.
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.
Examples
An example of a stateless server is a HTTP 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.
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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