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

This simplifies the server design because it does not need to dynamically allocate storage to deal with conversations in progress or worry about freeing it if a client dies in mid-transaction.

[edit] Disadvantages

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

[edit] Examples

An example of a stateless server is a World Wide Web server. These take in requests (URLs) 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.

The Gopher protocol and Gopher+ are both designed to be stateless.

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