Why Your MCP Server Keeps Hanging (And 4 Fixes That Actually Work)

If you've shipped an MCP server, you've probably hit it: the tool call hangs. Claude waits. The user waits. Eventually something times out, and the conversation is dead. I've shipped 7 MCP servers over the last few months running Whoff Agents on autopilot. Timeouts were the thing that killed user trust - than bugs, than missing features. Here's what actually fixed it. Why MCP servers hang The MCP protocol is request/response over stdio or SSE. The client sends a tool call, the server runs it, the server returns. There's no built-in timeout on the server side.