StatelessHTTPServerTransport: notifications/cancelled leaves the original POST hanging (HTTP exchange never completed)

[ianegordon]

Summary

In StatelessHTTPServerTransport (0.12.1), a request that is cancelled via notifications/cancelled leaves its original HTTP POST hanging indefinitely.

The cancellation flow correctly suppresses the JSON-RPC response (per base-protocol cancellation semantics, the server must not reply to a cancelled request). But the transport's HTTP waiter for that id is only ever resumed by two paths:

• a matching JSON-RPC response arriving through send(_:) (responseWaiters.removeValue(forKey: id) + resume), or
• full transport terminate() (responseWaiters.removeAll() after failing them).

Since a cancelled request produces no response and nothing else resumes the waiter, the withCheckedThrowingContinuation in handleJSONRPCRequest (…/StatelessHTTPServerTransport.swift:230-233) never returns, and the original POST's HTTP exchange never completes.

Spec conflict

MCP 2025-11-25, Streamable HTTP, Sending Messages to the Server #5:

"If the input is a JSON-RPC request, the server MUST either return Content-Type: text/event-stream, to initiate an SSE stream, or Content-Type: application/json, to return one JSON object."

And cancellation is the spec's own recommended flow (same section, #6):

"To cancel, the client SHOULD explicitly send an MCP CancelledNotification."

So a spec-conformant client that cancels an in-flight request drives the server into violating the MUST above — the POST receives neither an SSE stream nor a JSON object, ever.

Reproduction sketch

1. Start a server on StatelessHTTPServerTransport with a slow tool handler.
2. POST a tools/call request with id X; while it is in flight, POST a notifications/cancelled for id X (202 as expected).
3. Observe: the first POST never completes.

Suggested direction

• When processing notifications/cancelled, resume the matching responseWaiters entry so the HTTP exchange completes (e.g. with a JSON-RPC error object such as "request cancelled", keeping the HTTP layer satisfied while the JSON-RPC layer stays silent-by-design is admittedly awkward — an error response for the cancelled id seems the pragmatic choice given the transport MUST above).
• Independently, a waiter deadline would bound any orphaned exchange.

Related: filed separately, concurrent requests sharing a JSON-RPC id also orphan waiters via map overwrite.

Found during an MCP 2025-11-25 conformance audit of an app embedding this SDK. Happy to provide more detail.

[ianegordon]

Related: #254 — concurrent requests sharing a JSON-RPC id orphan waiters via map overwrite.