openclaw - 💡(How to fix) Fix Session fork caused by heartbeat compaction loop losing conversation context [1 comments, 2 participants]

Description

When a session mixes direct user chat (Telegram) with background subagent work (heartbeats, sherlock runs), the compaction system enters a loop that:

1. Repeatedly compacts every few seconds
2. Generates "No goal established — the conversation is empty" summaries despite active conversation history
3. Gets stuck with tokens around 70k, unable to reduce
4. Eventually causes OpenClaw to create a new session, losing all previous conversation context

Steps to Reproduce

1. Active Telegram session with ongoing conversation (user chatting about topic X)
2. Subagents running in background (sherlock investigations, etc.) feeding heartbeat messages into the same session
3. Heartbeats trigger compaction checks
4. Compaction runs repeatedly (~9 times in 21 seconds in our case)
5. Each compaction summary says "conversation is empty" — conversation context is lost
6. New session is created automatically, user arrives with no context

Evidence

Previous session — 9 compaction events in 21 seconds (17:44:06 to 17:44:27 UTC), all identical:

• summary: "No goal established — the conversation is empty"
• firstKeptEntryId: same for all
• tokensBefore: 70617 to 70908 (barely changing)
• All triggered by heartbeat messages

New session created at 17:44:53 UTC — 26 seconds after the last compaction burst.

Environment

• OpenClaw version: 2026.4.21 (f788c88)
• Model: Z.AI GLM-5 Turbo
• Compaction mode: default
• reserveTokens: 40000
• keepRecentTokens: 30000
• reserveTokensFloor: 20000
• Channel: Telegram
• 60+ child subagent sessions attached

Expected Behavior

Compaction should preserve conversation context (user messages, assistant responses about the active topic) and only compress/remove noise. If heartbeats are causing the issue, they should be excluded from compaction triggers or the compaction summary should accurately reflect the conversation.

Actual Behavior

Compaction erases conversation context, reports empty conversation, loops, and causes session fork — user loses all context from the current chat.