openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Bug: Completed isolated sessions (dreaming-narrative) never evicted from in-memory session store [1 comments, 2 participants]

Bug: Completed isolated sessions (dreaming-narrative) never evicted from in-memory session store

Description

The Memory Dreaming Promotion cron job spawns multiple isolated sub-sessions (deep/rem/light) each run. These sessions complete successfully (status: "done") but are never evicted from the Gateway's in-memory session store. Over time, they accumulate indefinitely.

Current Behavior

• The Memory Dreaming Promotion cron runs daily at 03:00 and spawns ~20 isolated sub-sessions per run (3 types × ~7 memory fragments)
• Each session completes in 7-25 seconds and marks as done
• The session entries persist in the Gateway's in-memory session store forever
• sessions_list returns all of them, growing unbounded

After 4 days of accumulation:

sessions_list(search="dreaming") → 82 results

Session breakdown by date:

• 4/17: ~21 sessions (timestamps 1777230xxx)
• 4/18: ~18 sessions (timestamps 1777316xxx)
• 4/19: ~18 sessions (timestamps 1777402xxx)
• 4/30: ~21 sessions (timestamps 1777489xxx)
• • 2 cron driver sessions

Expected Behavior

Completed isolated sessions should be automatically evicted from the in-memory store after a reasonable TTL (e.g., 1 hour after completion, or immediately upon completion for ephemeral tasks).

Impact

1. Memory leak: Each session entry holds ~20K-70K tokens of context metadata in memory
2. sessions_list pollution: Makes it impossible to find active/relevant sessions
3. Growing unboundedly: At ~20 sessions/day, this will accumulate thousands of entries over months

Workaround

We have a cleanup cron (cleanup_dreaming.sh) that archives .jsonl transcript files from disk, but this does not remove the entries from the Gateway's in-memory session store. There is no API or mechanism to programmatically evict completed sessions from memory.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.3.8-nightly.3
• Platform: macOS (Darwin arm64)
• Gateway: local daemon on port 18789

Suggested Fix

Add automatic eviction for completed isolated sessions:

• Option A: Auto-evict done/killed/timeout sessions from memory after a configurable TTL (default: 1h)
• Option B: Add a sessions_evict or sessions_cleanup API endpoint to programmatically remove completed sessions
• Option C: Limit in-memory session store to N most recent sessions per agent, evicting oldest first

Option A would be the most robust since it handles the general case without requiring external cleanup scripts.