mcp-context-cost

serena — context cost

8,204 tokens across 29 tools — moderate (5–15K). Measured 2026-08-17 under methodology v1.0.

   
server (self-reported) Serena v1.28.1
status measured
tokenizer tiktoken / o200k_base
launch command uvx --from git+https://github.com/oraios/serena serena start-mcp-server
isolation docker · ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:python3.12-bookworm-slim · network bridge · network enabled for package fetch; clean FS, no host credentials, git installed
env vars supplied none
canonical SHA-256 7d876a84707e0689df306366dc7c3225ae49762ca045d7604c7c9a2b20dfbc3c
category community
source https://github.com/oraios/serena

Where the tokens are

tool tokens share description schema
find_symbol 883 10.8% 273 530
replace_in_files 801 9.8% 225 497
search_for_pattern 524 6.4% 48 405
replace_content 479 5.8% 128 282
find_declaration 355 4.3% 8 280
find_implementations 346 4.2% 27 249
get_diagnostics_for_file 338 4.1% 52 211
execute_shell_command 330 4.0% 79 179
edit_memory 325 4.0% 10 249
find_referencing_symbols 310 3.8% 48 190
get_symbols_overview 301 3.7% 59 171
read_file 291 3.5% 23 202
list_dir 277 3.4% 30 181
replace_symbol_body 246 3.0% 36 138
write_memory 232 2.8% 74 85
insert_before_symbol 231 2.8% 56 105
rename_symbol 223 2.7% 59 97
insert_after_symbol 205 2.5% 24 110
find_file 180 2.2% 25 89
safe_delete_symbol 175 2.1% 31 75
rename_memory 174 2.1% 56 47
create_text_file 162 2.0% 22 71
initial_instructions 135 1.6% 52 14
activate_project 124 1.5% 11 47
read_memory 123 1.5% 26 31
delete_memory 114 1.4% 17 31
onboarding 112 1.4% 31 14
get_current_config 105 1.3% 22 14
list_memories 101 1.2% 9 25

Each tool is tokenized on its own, so the parts do not sum exactly to the whole: the array adds its own brackets and commas, and the tokenizer merges tokens across object boundaries. The badge number is always the count of the whole array, never a sum of parts.

Re-derive it

npx -y mcp-context-cost verify results/serena/measurement.json

That re-tokenizes the published capture and checks the count and the hash. If it disagrees with the badge, the badge is wrong — open an issue and it gets corrected.

Badge JSON · All servers · Leaderboard · Methodology