Multi-conversation session persistence

[isaacwasserman]

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Question Category

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Usage
• Server Implementation
• General Implementation
• Documentation
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Your Question

I'm working on an MCP client that's meant to serve multiple users and multiple independent conversations per-user. Since MCP servers are stateful and are meant to map one-to-one with a client, it seems I'll need a separate instance of the server for each conversation. However, this seems quite heavy and raises the question: how are we meant to persist the state of an MCP server across multiple sessions within the same conversation?

Example:

• User interacts with an MCP in conversation_1 server through the client
• User logs out (perhaps for multiple days)
• User re-joins conversation_1 and sends a new message

How should the state of the MCP server (especially its resources) be persisted across these two sessions? Does this session need to remain open indefinitely? What if the user has hundreds of conversations, each needing their own MCP server state?

Does MCP specification specify how this state should be maintained? Do we need to add a persistence API to the SDK that is able to store and retrieve session state? Alternatively, without this functionality, how is MCP meant to be used in environments with multiple users, multiple conversations, and persistent sessions?