openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Lossless‑Claw Compaction Failures Surface in OpenClaw Without Recovery Path

Bug type

Regression (worked before, now fails)

Beta release blocker

No

Summary

I’ve opened a detailed issue in the Lossless‑Claw repository because the root cause appears to be inside the compaction + deduplication engine itself. However, since Lossless‑Claw is bundled as the default session engine in OpenClaw, these failures surface directly during normal OpenClaw usage and cause runtime degradation that OpenClaw cannot detect, mitigate, or recover from.

This issue is specifically about OpenClaw’s integration layer and the lack of resilience when the bundled compaction engine enters a fail‑closed state.

Problem When Lossless‑Claw encounters certain internal failure modes (dedup fail‑closed, deferred compaction loops, slow‑path reconcile, ENOENT session‑file errors), OpenClaw:

continues running with corrupted or inconsistent session state silently drops messages repeatedly retries compaction without progress Consumes high CPU due to repeated assemble cycles never warns the user never resets or isolates the failing session never falls back to a safe mode

Because OpenClaw relies on Lossless‑Claw for session storage, deduplication, compaction, and summarization, these failures propagate directly into the OpenClaw runtime.

Steps to reproduce

enable lossless-claw and check he logs

Expected behavior

Expected Behavior in OpenClaw OpenClaw should:

Detect plugin failure modes dedup fail‑closed repeated slow‑path reconcile ENOENT session‑file errors compaction deferred indefinitely Warn the user UI banner log message diagnostic flag Provide recovery mechanisms auto‑reset corrupted sessions fallback to a minimal session engine safe‑mode compaction disable compaction for the affected agent Validate bundled plugin versions compatibility checks regression tests integration tests for compaction behavior Isolate plugin failures prevent one agent’s session corruption from affecting others prevent infinite maintenance loops

Actual behavior

Observed Symptoms in OpenClaw Across multiple agents (neon, sarah, alex, riley), OpenClaw logs show:

1. Dedup Fail‑Closed Code dedup: oversized, storedCount=487 batchLen=2, no overlap found — fail-closed skipping full batch Messages are silently dropped, causing session divergence.

2. Repeated Slow‑Path Reconcile Code transcript reconcile slow path (full re-read) reason=path-mismatch OpenClaw repeatedly re‑reads entire session files, increasing CPU load.

3. Deferred Compaction Loops Code maintain: deferred compaction skipped ... reason=deferred compaction still needed Compaction never executes, even as context grows.

4. ENOENT Session‑File Errors Code auto-rotate: action=warn ... error=ENOENT: no such file or directory OpenClaw attempts to rotate or read session files that no longer exist.

5. No Summaries Generated Code hasSummaryItems=false summaryCount=0 Sessions grow unbounded, increasing memory and token usage.

6. Duplicate Message Clusters Large clusters of repeated messages inflate context size.

OpenClaw version

2026.5.7

Operating system

Ubuntu

Install method

Openclaw script

Model

Minimax

Provider / routing chain

minimax

Additional provider/model setup details

No response

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

Impact and severity

Impact on OpenClaw Even though the root cause is in Lossless‑Claw, the impact is fully visible inside OpenClaw:

High CPU usage High disk I/O Session files becoming inconsistent Agents losing messages Context assembly repeatedly re‑running No user‑visible warnings No automatic recovery No fallback session engine No isolation of failing sessions This results in degraded performance across all agents and channels.

Additional information

hy This Matters Lossless‑Claw is not an optional plugin — it is the core session engine that OpenClaw depends on for:

context assembly deduplication compaction summarization session persistence When it fails, OpenClaw currently has no guardrails, which leads to: silent data loss performance degradation corrupted session state unpredictable agent behavior

OpenClaw needs to be resilient to failures in the components it bundles. Environment OpenClaw latest release

Lossless‑Claw bundled at: ~/.openclaw/npm/node_modules/@martian-engineering/lossless-claw/dist/

Multi‑agent, multi‑channel setup

Long‑running sessions Diagnostic logs available upon request Related Issue (Upstream) Lossless‑Claw issue: (link to your upstream issue here once created)