An MCP server receives a shutdown signal while three tool calls are st — MCP Professional Practice — Claude Cert Academy

An MCP server receives a shutdown signal while three tool calls are still in flight. What is the correct behavior?

• Exit immediately via process.exit() to free resources
• Drop the connection — the client will detect the timeout and retry
• Finish all in-flight requests, then close the transport cleanly
• Send error responses to the in-flight requests and then exit

Answer: Finish all in-flight requests, then close the transport cleanly

Graceful shutdown requires draining in-flight requests before closing the transport. Dropping the connection or exiting immediately leaves the client unable to know whether the tools ran — a state-correctness problem. Sending synthetic error responses is a last resort and should be avoided if the operations can complete.

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