TL;DR: I built a tiny tool that speaks the MCP protocol and ran it against 11 public Model Context Protocol servers. Handshake latency ranged from 97ms to nearly 21 seconds — a 215× spread — and the bigger problem isn't downtime at all. Free live index + open-source CLI at the bottom.
The itch
The Model Context Protocol went from a proposal to 10,000+ public servers in about a year. Agents now lean on these servers the way web apps lean on APIs. But I kept hitting flaky failures while building on them and couldn't tell: was it my code, or the server?
There's no Pingdom for MCP. So I built one — and the first thing I did was point it at a set of well-known public servers.
How it works (no API, just the protocol)
