MCP Git server mcp-git 2026.10.19: our test log

The MCP Git server 2026.10.19 started in 512 ms, listed 12 tools and answered git_status in 3.2 ms median.

By Agentic Weekly, operated independently from Texas, US · Published Oct 25, 2026 · Last updated Oct 26, 2026 (America/Chicago) · How we work

Tested by us on 2026-10-25. Local open-weight model, not the vendor's hosted models. A smoke test on a CPU-only box, not a benchmark.

Result at a glance

MCP Git server test record
Field	Value
Result	Passed
Version tested	mcp-git 2026.10.19
Date and time	2026-10-25, 22:37 CDT (America/Chicago)
Task	A small Python client written with the official MCP Python SDK (2.3.0) spawns the server as a child process over stdio, times the initialize handshake (cold start: spawn to initialize result), times one tools/list, then times 30 sequential tools/call requests and reports the median and 95th percentile. Numbers are milliseconds on the rig described on the methodology page.
Model used	none (no language model involved)
Hardware	Linux x86_64 virtual machine (Debian 13), 8 vCPU (Intel Xeon, 1 thread per core), 15 GiB RAM, no GPU
git_status on a fixture repo	cold start 512 ms; tools/list 3.6 ms (12 tools); 30 x git_status: median 3.2 ms, p95 3.7 ms

What we found

12 tools exposed: git_status, git_diff_unstaged, git_diff_staged, git_diff, git_commit, git_add, git_reset, git_log, git_create_branch, git_checkout, git_show, git_branch.
It shells out to the git library on every call, which is why a call is a few milliseconds instead of under one like the Node servers that read files directly.

What we ran, step by step

Commands run, wall-clock time and exit code
Step	Wall time	Exit code	Notes
Install with uv (cold, no cache)	2.21 s	0	mcp-server-git 2026.10.19; 34 MB on disk; load 4.16.
Latency run: git_status on a fixture repo	n/a	0	mcp-git 2026.10.19 (protocol 2025-11-25). cold start 512 ms; tools/list 3.6 ms (12 tools); 30 x git_status: median 3.2 ms, p95 3.7 ms. Load 2.38.

Exact commands (paths shortened)

# Install with uv (cold, no cache)
uv venv -q -p 3.13 work/pymcp/mcp-server-git && VIRTUAL_ENV=work/pymcp/mcp-server-git uv pip install --no-cache -q mcp-server-git

# Latency run: git_status on a fixture repo
work/pymcp/mcp-server-git/bin/mcp-server-git

Raw output (excerpts)

Output of the timed call (git_status on a fixture repo), first 300 characters

git_status({"repo_path": "/workspace/tests2/work/gitrepo"})
Repository status:
On branch master
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Gotchas and things that broke

The server needs an explicit repo_path argument on each call; the model has to supply it.

What we did not test

Remote (HTTP) transport, authentication and concurrent clients: only local stdio with one client was measured.
Large payloads: calls used tiny inputs, so these latencies are protocol and process overhead, not throughput.
Anything about answer quality: no model was involved in the latency numbers.
These are single smoke-test runs; it is not a benchmark. The machine was shared with other jobs.

Reproduce it

Versions change. These commands install whatever is latest on the day you run them unless a version is pinned, so expect different results later. The version we measured is in the table above.

VIRTUAL_ENV=.venv uv pip install mcp-server-git
.venv/bin/mcp-server-git

How to read this test

Every number on this page was measured on this one machine, which also ran other jobs, so timings are indicative and vary run to run. A pass means our small task worked once or as stated, a fail means it did not work as we ran it; neither says how the tool behaves with a vendor's frontier model, on a GPU, or at scale. Where a tool could not run without an account or a GPU, we say so instead of guessing.

See the testing rig for the hardware, the local model and the rules we follow, and the test hub for every other test.

MCP Inspector (CLI mode): MCP Inspector listed the filesystem server's 14 tools from the command line on both 0.15.0 (Node 20) and 2.12.0 (Node 24) in under a second; the 2.x install is smaller.
MCP Memory server: MCP Memory server answered over stdio in 284 ms cold (v1.0.0, Node 20) and 147 ms (v2.0.0, Node 24); median call 0.9 to 0.6 ms.
MCP Sequential Thinking server: MCP Sequential Thinking server answered over stdio in 271 ms cold (v1.0.0, Node 20) and 159 ms (v2.0.0, Node 24); median call 0.8 to 0.4 ms.
MCP Time server: The MCP Time server 2026.10.19 started in 483 ms and answered get_current_time in 0.8 ms median.
Notion MCP server: Notion MCP server 2.5.2 (@notionhq/notion-mcp-server) started over stdio in a median 316 ms and listed 24 tools in a median 16 ms; we did not make any authenticated call.
Playwright MCP: Playwright MCP 0.0.83 exposed 25 tools and navigated a headless Chrome to a local page in 40.5 ms median (cold start 383 ms).

All test logs · How we test

Sources

MCP reference servers repository (fetched 2026-10-25)

Markdown version for agents: /tests/mcp-server-git.md