openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix [Bug]: Severe slowness and near-unusability of WebUI after upgrading to OpenClaw 2026.5.22 on Windows 11

Bug type

Regression (worked before, now fails)

Beta release blocker

No

Summary

After upgrading OpenClaw from a prior version to 2026.5.22 (9290e19) on Windows 11, the WebUI became extremely slow to the point of being nearly unusable. Every interaction — sending a message, receiving a response, navigating between agents, even basic UI rendering — takes an abnormally long time (multiple seconds to tens of seconds). This was not the case before the upgrade; the previous version ran smoothly on the same machine with the same configuration.

Steps to reproduce

1.Install OpenClaw on Windows 11 (standalone/node-based installation at D:\soft.openclaw). 2.Configure multiple agents with local embedding (nomic-embed-text-v1.5) and separate workspaces (7 agents: main, system, javaman, webman, automan, pm, docman). 3.Use OpenClaw normally on a pre-2026.5.22 version — performance is acceptable. 4.Upgrade to OpenClaw 2026.5.22 (observed via auto-update mechanism on 2026-05-22 00:13 UTC+8; see gateway-restart.log). 5.Open the WebUI and attempt any interaction (send a message, switch agents, reset a session). 6.Observe extreme latency on every action.

Expected behavior

The WebUI should respond promptly to user interactions — message sending, agent switching, and session management should complete within 1-2 seconds, as they did in previous versions.

Actual behavior

After upgrading to 2026.5.22, all WebUI operations are severely degraded:

Sending a message takes 5-30+ seconds before any response appears. Switching between agents in the WebUI is sluggish. The UI frequently hangs or becomes unresponsive. Session "reset" actions are logged repeatedly (possibly due to timeouts), even during normal usage. The issue persists across restarts and persists through 2026-05-24 (2+ days after upgrade). The commands log (D:\soft.openclaw\logs\commands.log) shows predominantly "action":"reset" entries from "source":"webchat" after the upgrade, which may indicate timeout-triggered session resets compounding the problem.

OpenClaw version

2026.5.22 (9290e19)

Operating system

Microsoft Windows 11 Home (Build 22631) x64-based PC

Install method

pnpm

Model

openai/gpt-5.5

Provider / routing chain

openai

Additional provider/model setup details

No response

Logs, screenshots, and evidence

C:\Users\JiaLe>openclaw gateway run
$ node scripts/run-node.mjs "gateway" "run"
Config warnings:
- plugins.entries.active-memory: plugin disabled (disabled in config) but config is present

OpenClaw 2026.5.22 (9290e19) — Hot reload for config, cold sweat for deploys.

|
o
21:59:34 [gateway] loading configuration…
21:59:52 [gateway] resolving authentication…
21:59:52 [gateway] starting...
22:00:03 [gateway] starting HTTP server...
22:00:03 [health-monitor] started (interval: 300s, startup-grace: 60s, channel-connect-grace: 120s)
22:00:23 [gateway] agent model: kuaipao/gpt-5.4 (thinking=high, fast=off)
22:00:23 [gateway] http server listening (5 plugins: browser, llm-task, memory-core, memory-wiki, openai; 30.8s)
22:00:23 [gateway] log file: C:\Users\JiaLe\AppData\Local\Temp\openclaw\openclaw-2026-05-24.log
22:00:23 [gateway] security warning: dangerous config flags enabled: browser.ssrfPolicy.dangerouslyAllowPrivateNetwork=true. Run `openclaw security audit`.
22:00:23 [gateway] starting channels and sidecars...
22:00:24 [hooks] loaded 5 internal hook handlers
22:00:43 [browser/server] Browser control listening on http://127.0.0.1:18791/ (auth=token)
22:00:43 [gateway] ready
22:00:43 [heartbeat] started
22:00:43 [gateway] startup model warmup timed out after 5000ms; continuing without waiting
22:01:19 [ws] handshake timeout conn=6f23ab7c-19cc-4ec0-a527-29132fdd16d6 peer=127.0.0.1:26819->127.0.0.1:18789 remote=127.0.0.1
22:01:19 [ws] closed before connect conn=6f23ab7c-19cc-4ec0-a527-29132fdd16d6 peer=127.0.0.1:26819->127.0.0.1:18789 remote=127.0.0.1 fwd=n/a origin=http://127.0.0.1:18789 host=127.0.0.1:18789 ua=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 code=1000 reason=n/a
22:02:32 [ws] webchat connected conn=78706336-c4a4-4acc-9723-158e1d97ad39 remote=127.0.0.1 client=openclaw-control-ui webchat v2026.5.20
22:03:11 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ health 1510ms cached=true conn=78706336…ad39 id=e4df12ef…42b3
22:05:42 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ agents.list 151889ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=59706dbf…7330
22:05:44 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ models.authStatus 902ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=2fdb2cde…ee5b
22:05:45 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ commands.list 2724ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=860aa0e4…dabd
22:06:54 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ models.list 71384ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=6d2104b5…ee7c
22:06:56 [ws] webchat disconnected code=1006 reason=n/a conn=78706336-c4a4-4acc-9723-158e1d97ad39
22:08:55 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ sessions.list 192793ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=cb5bd5a2…7f40
22:08:55 [ws] handshake timeout conn=d9a00cf2-16ba-4015-ba42-65831d061523 peer=127.0.0.1:50743->127.0.0.1:18789 remote=127.0.0.1
22:08:59 [ws] ⇄ res ✓ chat.history 196312ms conn=78706336…ad39 id=887ac0ea…e135
22:09:00 [ws] closed before connect conn=d9a00cf2-16ba-4015-ba42-65831d061523 peer=127.0.0.1:50743->127.0.0.1:18789 remote=127.0.0.1 fwd=n/a origin=http://127.0.0.1:18789 host=127.0.0.1:18789 ua=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/148.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 code=1000 reason=n/a

Impact and severity

Severity: High / Critical

The WebUI is the primary interface for most users. After this upgrade, OpenClaw is effectively unusable via the WebUI on Windows. This blocks all workflows that depend on the WebUI for agent interaction, session management, and configuration. The issue has persisted for 2+ days without self-resolution.

The problem appears specific to this version (2026.5.22), as the previous version ran smoothly with the same configuration (7 agents, local embeddings, multiple workspaces).

Additional information

Additional Information Observations & Suspicions

1. Multi-agent architecture: With 7 agents each having separate workspaces and embedding indices, any change to session management or context loading could have multiplicative performance impact.
2. No explicit errors: The absence of error logs despite severe slowness suggests the issue may be blocking/synchronous operations (e.g., embedding loading, index rebuilding, or WebSocket handling) rather than crashing.

Questions for the team

1. Are there any debug flags or verbose logging options I can enable to provide more diagnostic data?

Workaround Attempts

• Restarted OpenClaw multiple times: no improvement.
• Restarted the Windows machine: no improvement.
• Tried different browsers: same behavior across Chrome and Edge.
• Waiting for extended periods: the slowness is consistent and does not resolve over time.