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SDK rejects valid SSE comments, causing initialization timeout with Tavily MCP remote server

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java
Domain
api

Research direction

Start in ResponseSubscribers.java at SseLineSubscriber.hookOnNext, then reproduce initialization with the Tavily MCP server and the shown transport setup. Done means valid SSE comment lines beginning with ':' no longer cause an invalid-response failure and client.initialize() completes normally.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

bug P2

The Java MCP SDK throws an McpError: Invalid SSE response when receiving SSE comment lines (lines starting with :), which are valid per the SSE specification. This causes initialization failures with MCP servers that send keep-alive or ping comments.

Environment
SDK Version: Java SDK (latest)
Protocol Version: 2025-03-26
Java Version: 17+
Affected Server: Tavily MCP Server (https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/)

Steps to Reproduce:

String url = "https://mcp.tavily.com/mcp/";

McpClientTransport transport = HttpClientStreamableHttpTransport.builder(url).build();

SyncSpec clientBuilder = McpClient.sync(transport);
McpSyncClient client = clientBuilder.build();

// This will fail during initialization
client.initialize();

Symptoms
Initial Symptom (with default/short timeout)
The initialization hangs and eventually times out:

_INFO io.modelcontextprotocol.client.LifecycleInitializer -- Server response with Protocol: 2025-03-26, Capabilities: ServerCapabilities[...], Info: Implementation[name=tavily-mcp, title=null, version=1.17.0] and Instructions null

WARN io.modelcontextprotocol.client.LifecycleInitializer -- Failed to initialize

java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException: Did not observe any item or terminal signal within 3000ms in 'map' (and no fallback has been configured)_

This timeout occurs because the SSE parsing is failing silently in the background, preventing the initialization from completing.
Root Cause Revealed (with increased timeout ~300 seconds)
When the timeout is increased significantly, the actual error becomes visible:

WARN io.modelcontextprotocol.client.LifecycleInitializer -- Handling exception

io.modelcontextprotocol.spec.McpError: Invalid SSE response. Status code: 200 Line: : ping - 2025-11-20 17:27:30.586492+00:00
at io.modelcontextprotocol.client.transport.ResponseSubscribers$SseLineSubscriber.hookOnNext(ResponseSubscribers.java:173)

Dominant language
Java
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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