Is the same agent instance needed

[jaydeepk]

Hi
I'm looking at implementing session support in agents.
Based on the examples provided, it looks like the same agent instance is used across calls.

First turn
result = await Runner.run(
    agent,
    "What city is the Golden Gate Bridge in?",
    session=session
)
print(result.final_output)  # "San Francisco"

Second turn - agent automatically remembers previous context
result = await Runner.run(
    agent,
    "What state is it in?",
    session=session
)

Do we need to ensure that the same agent instance is used everytime?
Would this still work if a different agent instance is created in the second turn (with the same session) ?
Any recommendations / guidance.

Thanks
Jaydeep

[seratch]

Hi, thanks for asking the question. No, you don't need to use the same agent. As long as agents can handle the conversation context, you can switch to a different agent as necessary.

[jaydeepk]

Thanks a lot for the clarification @seratch.
I want to expand my usecase a bit further and understand the correct way to implement it.
I have a FastApi app which accepts user queries and passes them to an agent.
The agent interacts with a MCP server (SSE Transport).

self.agent = Agent(
            name="Assistant",
            instructions="Use the tools to interact with the API.",
            mcp_servers=[self.mcp_server],
            model=model_name()
        )

I maintain the mcp server instance globally ..and was wondering if I should maintain the agent globally as well.
So is it better to have one agent instance which is used across requests, or create a new one every time?

[seratch]

A web server usually needs multiple instances for scalability. So, for those production-grade apps, you may want to run more than one web app instances along with shared sessions store: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/sessions/ At this moment, only SQLite 3 implementation is provided, but community developers are now working on Redis nd PostgreSQL additions using the same memory interface.

[jaydeepk]

Thanks this is very helpful.
Yes, ideally it would be good to have something like Redis or Postgress/MySQL to store the session.
For now a custom in memory store could work for me.
Just one last thing before I close this:
I'm more inclined towards creating a new Agent instance per request ..would that be okay?

[seratch]

Yeah, creating an Agent instance per request is totally fine! Thanks for using this SDK!

[jaydeepk]

Great ..thanks a lot for all your help @seratch, really appreciate it.