Why do the MCP servers need to be a separate service?

[prajwalnayak7]

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Discussion Topic

Making MCP servers a separate service have the following disadvantages:

1. Latency in establishing the HTTP connection and hassles of maintaining the session
2. Operation, infra and maintenance required for this service

Also, why does running a client require to specify the server path, aren't they supposed to be decoupled? uv run client.py path/to/server.py

I feel a clean abstraction package as a library would be a better choice as all that MCP servers provide are functions which can be directly called by clients without the network connections.

Please correct me if my understanding of MCP (just started few days ago) has missing pieces.

[PederHP]

There's no stipulation that the server is a service or process. The available transports do impact the options somewhat.

Also, library is a platform/language specfic concept. Is it a dll? An so file? Wasm? A crate?

MCP is a protocol so it's really up to you how you develop the server. You can use any language or platform really. Transports do pose some limitations, but if you hit those I am sure you can do PR to add a new transport and engage with the maintainers/community about it.

What is your use case if I may ask?