stateless

A stateless server is one which treats each request as an

independent transaction, unrelated to any previous request.

This simplifies the server design because it does not need to

allocate storage to deal with conversations in progress or

worry about freeing it if a client dies in mid-transaction. 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.

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 transfer mode have been set.