Why Stateful vs Stateless Matters
Web servers can be stateful or stateless. The difference is whether the server keeps client-specific state between requests. That choice affects how you scale, how you load-balance, and where you store things like sessions and connection state.
Stateful servers
In a stateful model, the server maintains some knowledge about the client from one request to the next. For example:
- Session data—login state, shopping cart, user preferences—stored in memory or on disk on that server.