Reduce MCP Tool Latency

Measure first

Separate model latency, tool discovery, network transport, server queueing, downstream API/database work, and serialization.

Common improvements

• Cache stable tool/resource lists.
• Reuse HTTP and DB connection pools.
• Deploy close to downstream systems/users.
• Return concise structured payloads.
• Parallelize genuinely independent I/O.
• Avoid unnecessary agent turns.

Don't optimize the wrong hop

Saving 5 ms in MCP serialization is irrelevant if the downstream search API takes 3 seconds. Traces should guide effort.