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SDKs and other middleware SHOULD allow these timeouts to be configured on a per-request basis. #600
Description
Describe the bug
According to the MCP specs:
"SDKs and other middleware SHOULD allow these timeouts to be configured on a per-request basis."
But looking at the code the timeouts are set at the session level and not easily configured on a per-request basis as the specs recommend:
async def send_request(
self,
request: SendRequestT,
result_type: type[ReceiveResultT],
) -> ReceiveResultT:
...
try:
with anyio.fail_after(
None
if self._read_timeout_seconds is None
else self._read_timeout_seconds.total_seconds()
):
response_or_error = await response_stream_reader.receive()
except TimeoutError:
raise McpError(
ErrorData(
code=httpx.codes.REQUEST_TIMEOUT,
message=(
f"Timed out while waiting for response to "
f"{request.__class__.__name__}. Waited "
f"{self._read_timeout_seconds} seconds."
),
)
)Suggestion
Add an optional argument request_read_timeout_seconds and rename current _read_timeout_seconds into session_read_timeout_seconds if request_read_timeout_seconds is set it would override the session one.
I will publish a small PR in that sense.
Activity
grll commentedon Apr 29, 2025
also maybe on another note but I find calling the argument read_timeout_seconds and using a timedelta a bit odd, I would expect an int to be passed for "seconds"
njbrake commentedon Jun 3, 2025
Hi @grll I'm here too because we are having a similar problem in any-agent 😆 : mozilla-ai/any-agent#422
In our case, we want to have a higher timeout for the initialization, since it may involve pulling a docker image which may take longer than the timeout that we would want to use.
Maybe as a hack, we could set
_session_read_timeout_secondsto be what we want when the initialization happens, and then re-set the value back to it's normal value for everything after the initialization, but it seems to defeat the purpose of there being therequest_read_timeout_secondsparameter in send_request.grll commentedon Jun 3, 2025
@njbrake maybe not ideal but you could use a high _session_read_timeout_seconds and low request_read_timeout_seconds on every request afterward?
maxisbey commentedon Jul 29, 2026
Thanks for the report. This has been available for a while now, including in the current release (see #601). Closing this as part of a wider backlog cleanup following the v2 launch. If you still run into this on v2, feel free to reopen.
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