openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Session lifecycle never finalizes — status: "running" persists after session close, breaking maintenance eviction and dashboard observability [1 participants]

Bug type: Behavior bug

Summary

When a session ends normally, the Gateway never updates the status field in sessions.json. The field stays "running" regardless of how the session ended — whether it ran for 2 minutes via a cron job or 8 hours interactively. This has two concrete consequences:

Consequence 1 — Maintenance eviction is broken. sessions cleanup and session.maintenance.pruneAfter are designed to keep sessions.json bounded by evicting entries older than a configurable age threshold. But pruneAfter uses updatedAt as a proxy — and with no terminal status value, a week-old entry for a session that ended normally looks identical to a currently-live session. Both have status: "running" and a recent-ish updatedAt. On a system running ~15 cron jobs with 48h sessionRetention, sessions.json accumulates 200+ entries within weeks, all showing status: "running".

Consequence 2 — Dashboard shows every historical session as active. Nerve, Control UI, and any tool reading sessions.list report all sessions as active because every entry has status: "running". A 2-minute cron run from 3 days ago is indistinguishable from a live interactive session.

Steps to reproduce

1. sessions_spawn a subagent for any task
2. Let it complete normally (no crash, no abort)
3. Inspect ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions/sessions.json
4. The entry has status: "running" and no endedAt — even though the session is done

// sessions.json entry for a subagent that ran 3 days ago and completed normally:
{
  "status": "running",      // ← should be "completed" or "ended"
  "updatedAt": 1777134600292,  // 3 days ago
  "sessionId": "d5a486a6-385c-47fd-9279-4a40d7d53afd",
  "model": "MiniMax-M2.7",
  "startedAt": 1777134599292
  // no endedAt written
}

Expected behavior

When a session closes normally, the Gateway should write status to a terminal value ("completed" or "ended") and populate endedAt. On natural close, timeout, or abort — all three paths should finalize the session entry.

Actual behavior

• status stays "running" on natural close (the most common path)
• status: "done" or status: "failed" only reflect the last turn's outcome, not the session lifecycle
• endedAt is only written by sessions cleanup --fix-missing as a side-effect repair, not as part of normal session close
• session_end lifecycle hooks only fire when a new session starts and the previous session ID differs — not on graceful session close (#57790)

Root cause

The status field was designed to reflect the outcome of the last communication turn, not the session lifecycle (documented in #64103). The session-close path was never wired to write a terminal status value. The lifecycle hook that would finalize sessions.json entries (session_end) is only fired on new-session-handoff, not on session termination.

Examples

Proposed fix

1. Terminal status values — add "completed", "aborted", "timed_out" as terminal lifecycle states alongside the existing turn-state values. Existing "running" / "done" / "failed" remain for backward compatibility.
2. Wire session close to terminal status — the Gateway writes the appropriate terminal value when a session ends naturally, due to timeout (#70347), or due to external abort.
3. session_end on graceful close — expand the session_end hook firing to include graceful session termination, not only new-session-handoff (#57790).
4. Make eviction status-aware — sessions cleanup treats any non-"running" status as an eviction candidate, making pruneAfter functional.
5. Retroactive cleanup — provide a sessions cleanup --finalize-stale command that marks obviously-dead entries (status: "running" + no matching active .jsonl) as "ended".

Related issues