openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature: Make streamingWatchdogMs configurable [1 comments, 2 participants]

Summary

The TUI webchat shows a "This response is taking longer than expected. Send another message to continue." message after 30 seconds of no streaming data (DEFAULT_STREAMING_WATCHDOG_MS = 30000). This timeout is currently hardcoded and cannot be adjusted via openclaw.json.

Motivation

When using remote LLM APIs (especially with complex multi-tool-call tasks), it's common for the model to take 30-90+ seconds between streaming chunks due to reasoning/execution time. The 30s watchdog triggers a misleading "taking longer than expected" message to the user even though the task is running normally in the background.

Proposal

Expose streamingWatchdogMs as a configurable option in openclaw.json under a reasonable path (e.g., webchat.streamingWatchdogMs or agents.defaults.streamingWatchdogMs), defaulting to the current 30000.

// openclaw.json
{
  "webchat": {
    "streamingWatchdogMs": 90000  // 90s, triple the default
  }
}

The gateway would pass this value into the TUI context so the existing logic context.streamingWatchdogMs picks it up automatically.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.5.12
• Channel: webchat
• Found in: dist/tui-*.js -> DEFAULT_STREAMING_WATCHDOG_MS