Why are RESTful Applications easier to scale

Question

I always read that one reason to chose a RESTful architecture is (among others) better scalability for Webapplications with a high load.

Why is that? One reason I ca

Answer 1

A part of REST is indeed the URL part (it's the R in REST) but the S is more important for scaling: state.

The server end of REST is stateless, which means that the server doesn't have to store anything across requests. This means that there doesn't have to be (much) communication between servers, making it horizontally scalable.

Of course, there's a small bonus in the R (representational) in that a load balancer can easily route the request to the right server if you have nice URLs, and GET could go to a slave while POSTs go to masters.