openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: openclaw doctor fails on large session store with stale sessions.json.*.tmp accumulation [1 comments, 2 participants]

Bug type

Crash (process/app exits or hangs)

Beta release blocker

No

Summary

openclaw doctor fails on one long-lived installation where ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions contains a 154 MB sessions.json and 67 stale sessions.json.*.tmp files totaling about 787 MB.

Steps to reproduce

1. Use an installation where ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions has grown to approximately 1.2 GB total, including a large monolithic sessions.json and many sessions.json.*.tmp files.
2. Run openclaw doctor.
3. Observe that doctor fails with a V8 deserialization stack trace ending near ValueDeserializer::ReadObjectWrapper() / ValueDeserializer::ReadValue(...).

Expected behavior

openclaw doctor should complete successfully on long-lived installations with large session history and should not be destabilized by stale sessions.json.*.tmp files.

Actual behavior

openclaw doctor failed, and the observed stack trace ended near:

ValueDeserializer::ReadObjectWrapper()
ValueDeserializer::ReadValue(...)

On the affected installation, the sessions directory measured approximately:

• total size: ~1.2 GB
• sessions.json: 154,466,795 bytes
• sessions.json.*.tmp: 786,956,288 bytes across 67 files
• *.jsonl: 200,251,621 bytes across 2154 files
• *.reset.*: 75,188,435 bytes across 48 files

OpenClaw version

2026.3.28

Operating system

Linux arm64

Install method

npm global

Model

openai-codex/gpt-5.4

Provider / routing chain

openclaw -> openai-codex/gpt-5.4

Additional provider/model setup details

NOT_ENOUGH_INFO

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

Observed failure tail:
ValueDeserializer::ReadObjectWrapper()
ValueDeserializer::ReadValue(...)

Measured session-store facts on the affected installation:
- entries in sessions.json: 2378
- top-level key distribution:
  - openresponses: 1236
  - openai: 675
  - discord: 202
  - cron: 194
  - subagent: 47

Largest files in ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions included:
- sessions.json — 154 MB
- multiple sessions.json.<uuid>.tmp files in the 40–79 MB range
- largest .jsonl files were roughly 10–12 MB

Impact and severity

Affected: at least one long-lived high-activity installation with a large session store Severity: high (diagnostic command failure) Frequency: observed on the affected installation when running openclaw doctor Consequence: health/diagnostic workflow fails, and the session store can consume significant extra disk space due to stale temp files

Additional information

This appears to have two grounded aspects:

• openclaw doctor failure on a large session store
• substantial accumulation of stale sessions.json.*.tmp files

Suggested long-term direction: replace the monolithic sessions.json catalog with a SQLite-backed session metadata store while keeping per-session transcripts as append-only JSONL files. That would allow indexed/incremental reads, safer updates, and lower memory pressure for doctor/status/session inspection paths.