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The Model Context Protocol includes an optional ping mechanism that allows either party to verify that their counterpart is still responsive and the connection is alive.

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Overview

The ping functionality is implemented through a simple request/response pattern. Either the client or server can initiate a ping by sending a ping request.
ping is an MCP-level liveness check and MAY be sent by either party at any time on an established session/connection.In Streamable HTTP, implementations SHOULD prefer transport-level SSE keepalive mechanisms for idle-connection maintenance; ping remains available for protocol-level responsiveness checks.Request-association requirements for roots/list, sampling/createMessage, and elicitation/create do not apply to ping.

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Message Format

A ping request is a standard JSON-RPC request with no parameters: 
{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": "123",
  "method": "ping"
}

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Behavior Requirements

  1. The receiver MUST respond promptly with an empty response:
{
  "jsonrpc": "2.0",
  "id": "123",
  "result": {}
}
  1. If no response is received within a reasonable timeout period, the sender MAY:
    • Consider the connection stale
    • Terminate the connection
    • Attempt reconnection procedures

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Usage Patterns

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Implementation Considerations

  • Implementations SHOULD periodically issue pings to detect connection health
  • The frequency of pings SHOULD be configurable
  • Timeouts SHOULD be appropriate for the network environment
  • Excessive pinging SHOULD be avoided to reduce network overhead

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Error Handling

  • Timeouts SHOULD be treated as connection failures
  • Multiple failed pings MAY trigger connection reset
  • Implementations SHOULD log ping failures for diagnostics