openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Feature: Telegram polling watchdog — auto-restart connection on stall without killing gateway [1 participants]

Description

When Telegram long polling stalls (due to network issues, DNS failures, or upstream Telegram API instability), the entire gateway can become unresponsive. Currently there is no mechanism to detect a stalled Telegram connection and restart just the polling loop — the only recovery is a full gateway restart, which itself triggers the update_id reprocessing bug (#59331).

Problem

• Telegram polling hangs silently — no inbound messages are processed
• The gateway process itself stays alive (health check passes), but the bot appears dead
• The only recovery is openclaw gateway restart, which:
  • Interrupts all active sessions across all channels (Discord, WebChat, etc.)
  • Triggers message reprocessing (see #59331)
  • Loses in-flight completion state
• Observed as a contributing factor in crashes on 3/22, 3/26, 3/31, 4/1

Proposed Solution

Add a configurable watchdog for the Telegram polling loop:

{
  channels: {
    telegram: {
      watchdog: {
        enabled: true,
        stallTimeoutSeconds: 90,
        maxRestarts: 5,
        cooldownSeconds: 30,
      }
    }
  }
}

Behavior:

1. Track the timestamp of the last successful poll response (even if it returned zero updates)
2. If stallTimeoutSeconds elapses with no poll response, tear down and restart the grammY polling runner
3. Log every watchdog recovery event at warn level
4. After maxRestarts consecutive restarts without a successful stable connection, log at error and stop retrying
5. Successful stable polling (e.g., 60s of normal operation) resets the restart counter

Why This Matters

• Telegram is the only channel where a transport-level stall can silently kill the bot with no user-visible error
• Discord has its own reconnect logic via discord.js
• A polling watchdog is standard practice for long-polling consumers
• This would eliminate the most common cause of "bot went dark" reports

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.4.1 (da64a97)
• macOS (arm64), Node v22.22.1
• Telegram: long polling mode (default)