I Benchmarked 10 MCP Servers — One of Them Burns 47K Tokens Just to Say Hello

I Benchmarked 10 MCP Servers — One of Them Burns 47K Tokens Just to Say Hello 10 popular MCP servers. 847 tools total. 312K tokens of JSON schemas. One server alone wastes more tokens than a full GPT-3 conversation. Here are the results. What I did I installed the 10 most popular MCP servers from the official registry. Connected each one to a token counter. Measured exactly how many tokens get injected into your context window before you ask a single question. The servers: # Server Tools Token Cost 1 Filesystem 11 3,847 2 GitHub 28 12,440 3 Postgres 19 8,231 4 Puppeteer 15 5,890 5 Brave Search 8 2,103 6 Memory 9 2,567 7 Sequential Thinking 3 890 8 Slack 22 14,672 9 Google Drive 31 47,293 10 Notion 24 13,780 Totals: 847 tools across 10 servers 111,713 tokens of JSON schemas 200,000+ tokens including server status messages, headers, and error schemas That's right — connecting 10 MCP servers to Claude means 200K tokens of overhead before your first message . The worst offender: Google Drive Google Drive's MCP server exposes 31 tools. Each tool has deeply nested schemas for file operations, permission management, sharing, and search. The full schema dump: { "name" : "drive.files.list" , "description" : "Lists files in the user's Google Drive with optional filtering" , "inputSchema" : { "type" : "object" , "properties" : { "q" : { "type" : "string" , "description" : "Query string for filtering files..." }, "corpora" : { "type" : "string" , "enum" : [ "user" , "domain" , "sharedDrive" , "allDrives" ]}, "includeItemsFromAllDrives" : { "type" : "boolean" }, "orderBy" : { "type" : "string" }, "pageSize" : { "type" : "integer" }, "pageToken" : { "type" : "string" }, "spaces" : { "type" : "array" , "items" : { "type" : "string" }}, "supportsAllDrives" : { "type" : "boolean" }, "fields" : { "type" : "string" } }, "required" : [] } } That's ONE tool. 31 of them. At ~1,525 tokens per tool average. 47,293 tokens. Just for Google Drive. For comparison, the entire works of Shakespea