ClientSessionGroup: a rejected connect_to_server leaves its transport running — the session is established before its components are validated

Initial Checks

• I confirm that I'm using the newest release of my line (the latest 2.x, or the latest 1.x if I'm still on v1)
• I confirm that I searched for my issue in https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/issues before opening this issue

Release line

2.x (current stable), reproduced at 9972c21a on mcp 2.2.0.

Description

ClientSessionGroup.connect_to_server opens the transport first and validates the server's components second. When the duplicate-name check rejects the server, the transport it already opened is never closed, and the caller is never handed the session, so nothing else can close it either.

The order in session_group.py is:

1. _establish_session launches the transport, runs initialize, stores the stack in self._session_exit_stacks[session], and enters it into self._exit_stack.
2. _aggregate_components lists the components and hits raise MCPError(..., message=f"{matching_tools} already exist in group tools.").
3. self._sessions[session] = component_names is on the line after that raise, so it never runs.

That leaves the connection live but unreachable:

• group.sessions reads self._sessions, which the rejected server never reached, so it is not listed.
• disconnect_from_server(session) would close it, but it needs the ClientSession object and connect_to_server raised instead of returning one.
• self._exit_stack still holds the stack, so it is released only when the whole group tears down.

For stdio that is a live child process. For streamable HTTP it is an initialized session on a server that counts sessions against max_sessions. Both grow by one per rejection.

This is the case the docs treat as ordinary rather than exotic. docs/client/session-groups.md says two servers you don't control "will collide eventually", and its !!! check fence tells the reader to run exactly this and see the MCPError. The same page says the error is "raised before anything from the second server is registered" — true of the three component dicts, but not of the connection that was opened to read them.

It costs a long-lived host that connects servers dynamically, or retries a failed connect: one more process or session per attempt, none of them reclaimable until the group closes.

Expected: a connect_to_server that raises should close the transport it opened before the exception leaves, so "nothing from the second server is registered" covers its connection too. If holding it is deliberate, the session needs to be reachable — attached to the raised MCPError, or listed by group.sessions — so the caller can close it.

Two notes to save review time:

• connect_with_session, the other caller of _aggregate_components, is unaffected: the caller owns that session and still holds it. That is also why existing coverage misses this. tests/docs_src/test_session_groups.py says so directly — "connect_to_server opens a real transport (a subprocess or a socket), so these tests drive the exact same aggregation path through connect_with_session with in-memory sessions instead." The leak exists only on the path the tests substitute away.
• Not a duplicate of #3384. That one is a KeyError from del self._session_exit_stacks[session] in the empty-server branch. This is the duplicate-name branch, which raises MCPError by design — the defect is what stays running afterwards. The three PRs written for #3384 (#3386, #3419, #3428) all delete that one block and leave this path untouched, so fixing #3384 does not fix this.

#3228 looks like the same shape one layer down — a request the server refuses still leaves a registered session behind because the session is created before validation.

Example Code

import asyncio
import os
import subprocess
import sys
import tempfile
from pathlib import Path

from mcp import ClientSessionGroup, MCPError, StdioServerParameters

SERVER = """
from mcp.server import MCPServer

mcp = MCPServer({name!r})


@mcp.tool()
def search(query: str) -> str:
    \"\"\"Search.\"\"\"
    return f"{name} got {{query!r}}"


if __name__ == "__main__":
    mcp.run()
"""


def children() -> set[int]:
    out = subprocess.run(["pgrep", "-P", str(os.getpid())], capture_output=True, text=True).stdout.split()
    return {int(p) for p in out}


async def main() -> None:
    tmp = Path(tempfile.mkdtemp())
    for name in ("Library", "Web"):
        (tmp / f"{name}.py").write_text(SERVER.format(name=name))

    py = sys.executable
    library = StdioServerParameters(command=py, args=[str(tmp / "Library.py")])
    web = StdioServerParameters(command=py, args=[str(tmp / "Web.py")])

    async with ClientSessionGroup() as group:
        await group.connect_to_server(library)
        base = children()

        for attempt in range(1, 4):
            try:
                await group.connect_to_server(web)
            except MCPError as err:
                print(f"rejection #{attempt}: {err}")
            print(
                f"   live subprocesses left behind : {len(children() - base)}\n"
                f"   group.sessions                : {len(group.sessions)}\n"
                f"   group.tools                   : {sorted(group.tools)}"
            )


if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Output on 2.2.0:

rejection #1: {'search'} already exist in group tools.
   live subprocesses left behind : 1
   group.sessions                : 1
   group.tools                   : ['search']
rejection #2: {'search'} already exist in group tools.
   live subprocesses left behind : 2
   group.sessions                : 1
   group.tools                   : ['search']
rejection #3: {'search'} already exist in group tools.
   live subprocesses left behind : 3
   group.sessions                : 1
   group.tools                   : ['search']

Same growth on StreamableHttpParameters against two HTTP servers, where what accumulates is an initialized session rather than a process — len(group._session_exit_stacks) - len(group._sessions) goes 1, 2, 3 while group.sessions stays at 1.

origin/v1.x has the same ordering — stack stored at session_group.py:348, entered into _exit_stack at :351, the duplicate check raises at :433, and self._sessions[session] is set at :438 — so 1.x looks affected too, though I only ran the reproduction on 2.2.0.

Python & MCP Python SDK

Python 3.10.20, mcp 2.2.0, starlette via httpx2, macOS 26.5.2 (arm64)

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I used AI assistance to narrow this down and to build the reproduction; I ran it myself and can walk through the code path. If you'd like an outside PR for it, I'd like to take the fix.

Start in session_group.py with _establish_session, _aggregate_components, and the connect_to_server path to trace ownership of the exit stack when duplicate components raise MCPError. Review tests/docs_src/test_session_groups.py and run the supplied reproduction; add coverage for a rejected real connection. Done means the opened transport is closed on failure and no unreachable session remains.