openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature: ephemeral sessions — dispose on completion instead of retention timer [1 comments, 1 participants]

Problem

Cron jobs and webhook/hook-triggered agent runs create sessions that linger in the session store until a retention timer expires (cron.sessionRetention or session.maintenance.pruneAfter). For isolated, one-shot workloads like email processing or webhook handlers, these sessions have no value after the run completes — there is no follow-up message, no context to preserve.

This leads to session store bloat. In our setup, a 15-minute email-catchup cron accumulated 100+ stale sessions before we noticed and configured aggressive retention + enforcement. The current options are:

• cron.sessionRetention (duration-based cleanup for cron sessions)
• session.maintenance.pruneAfter (duration-based cleanup for all sessions)
• session.maintenance.maxEntries (cap-based eviction)

None of these express the intent: "this session is done, clean it up now."

Proposed solution

Add an ephemeral session mode that disposes of the session entry (and optionally its transcript) immediately after the agent turn completes.

Possible surface areas:

Cron jobs

openclaw cron add --session isolated --ephemeral --message "Check email" ...

Or a JSON field:

{ "sessionTarget": "isolated", "ephemeral": true }

Hook mappings

{
  match: { path: "gmail" },
  action: "agent",
  sessionKey: "hook:gmail:{{messages[0].id}}",
  ephemeral: true,  // dispose session after run
}

Behavior

• On run completion (success or error), the session entry is removed from sessions.json
• Transcript file is either deleted or moved to an archive path (configurable)
• Run log entry in cron/runs/ is unaffected (still governed by cron.runLog.*)
• No change to non-ephemeral sessions

Alternatives considered

• Very short retention (sessionRetention: "1m"): works but is a workaround — still timer-based, still creates entries that linger briefly, and the cleanup depends on the next maintenance cycle running.
• maxEntries cap: reactive eviction, not proactive cleanup. Doesn't express intent.

Context

With recurring cron jobs running every 15 minutes and webhook hooks firing on each email, session stores grow quickly. Duration-based retention is the wrong primitive for fire-and-forget workloads — completion-based disposal would be cleaner and more efficient.