react-render-profile-mcp 🐸⚡

An MCP server that decodes React DevTools Profiler exports into actionable render summaries for AI agents.

Your agent just refactored a context provider. Now 80 components re-render on every keystroke. It has no idea.

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🤔 The Problem

AI agents modify React state management, restructure component trees, and refactor context — and they're completely blind to the performance impact.

The React DevTools Profiler can capture exactly what happened: which components re-rendered, why, and how long it took. But the exported .json is a dense structure with Fiber IDs, encoded operations, and microsecond timing data across hundreds of commits.

{
  "version": 5,
  "dataForRoots": [{
    "commitData": [{
      "fiberActualDurations": [[3, 15.2], [4, 8.1], [142, 3.2], ...],
      "fiberSelfDurations": [[3, 3.9], [4, 4.9], [142, 3.2], ...],
      "changeDescriptions": { "4": { "props": [], "didHooksChange": false, ... } },
      ...
    }],
    ...
  }]
}

The agent can't parse this. Even if it could, it can't run the aggregation to identify which components are wasting renders — it's raw tick data, not a performance summary.

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✅ The Fix

This MCP server loads the profiler export and gives agents exactly what they need:

• Which components re-rendered the most — and how much CPU time they consumed
• Which re-renders were spurious (props reference changed, no actual keys differed)
• What triggered a specific render cascade
• Which components are React.memo candidates

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🛠️ Tools

get_render_summary

High-level overview: total commits, total render time, top 5 slowest components, total spurious render count.

{
  "total_commits": 24,
  "total_render_ms": 312.4,
  "total_spurious_renders": 18,
  "top_components": [
    {
      "component": "ProductList",
      "render_count": 24,
      "total_self_ms": 89.2,
      "pct_of_total": 28.55
    },
    {
      "component": "SearchInput",
      "render_count": 24,
      "total_self_ms": 61.1,
      "pct_of_total": 19.56
    }
  ]
}

Use first to understand the scale of the problem.

find_spurious_renders

Components that re-rendered without any prop, state, context, or hook changes. These are the classic unstable reference bugs — inline objects, arrow functions, or arrays created on every parent render.

{
  "spurious_renders": [
    {
      "component": "ProductList",
      "render_count": 24,
      "spurious_count": 23,
      "wasted_ms": 84.3,
      "reason": "props reference changed but no prop keys differed — unstable object/function/array from parent"
    }
  ]
}

Use to find React.memo targets with the highest ROI.

get_hottest_components

Top N components by self CPU time (excluding children). Includes average per render and percentage of total profile time.

trace_render_cascade

For a specific commit, shows what triggered it and every component that re-rendered as a result, sorted by duration.

{
  "trigger": "SearchInput",
  "total_commit_ms": 28.4,
  "cascade": [
    {
      "component": "ProductList",
      "self_ms": 18.2,
      "actual_ms": 18.2,
      "reason": "parent re-rendered (unstable props reference)"
    },
    {
      "component": "SearchInput",
      "self_ms": 9.1,
      "actual_ms": 9.1,
      "reason": "hook changed"
    }
  ]
}

Use to understand propagation — why did 40 components re-render from one click?

suggest_memoization

Concrete React.memo suggestions ranked by wasted milliseconds, with the reason explained.

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🚀 Setup

Claude Desktop

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "react-render-profile": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "react-render-profile-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor / VS Code / Any MCP client

{
  "react-render-profile": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y", "react-render-profile-mcp"]
  }
}

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📋 How to Export a Profile

1. Open React DevTools in Chrome DevTools
2. Go to the Profiler tab
3. Click Record, interact with your app, click Stop
4. Click the Save icon (💾) to export the .json file
5. Pass the absolute path to any tool as profile_path

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🔧 How It Works

The parser decodes the React DevTools Profiler export format (version 5):

• fiberID → component name from snapshots (primary) or the encoded operations integer array (fallback)
• Spurious render detection via changeDescriptions.props === [] — React records an empty array when the props object reference changed but no individual prop keys differed
• Aggregation across all commits: total self time, render counts, wasted time per component

No React dependency. No DevTools packages. Pure JSON parsing.

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📖 Agent Workflow

1. get_render_summary         → understand the scale of the problem
2. find_spurious_renders      → find wasted render targets
3. trace_render_cascade       → understand why a specific commit re-rendered so much
4. suggest_memoization        → get concrete React.memo candidates

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🐸 Part of the MCP Toolbelt

Built alongside:

• tailwind-context-resolver-mcp — resolve Tailwind design tokens and validate class strings
• v8-cpu-profile-decoder-mcp — V8 CPU profile analysis for Node.js performance

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License

MIT