Summary

On every Gateway restart, the sidecar subprocess re-scans plugins but reads an incomplete config context. This causes:

1. warnWhenAllowlistIsOpen() fires with \plugins.allow\ appearing empty (false-positive)
2. \memory-lancedb-pro\ fails schema validation: \embedding: must have required property 'embedding'\ (false-positive)
3. Gateway retries plugin loading multiple times (up to 3 attempts)
4. 
   ode.list\ gets blocked for 75+ seconds during the retry cascade
5. 
   etriever.test()\ times out after 8000ms

Total wasted time per restart: ~106 seconds (from sidecar plugin reload to successful 3rd registration).

Environment

• OpenClaw version: latest (npm global install, 2026-04-22)
• OS: Windows Server 2019 (x64), Node.js v24.13.0
• Plugin affected: \[email protected]\
• \plugins.allow\ is explicitly configured in \openclaw.json\ — this is not a missing config issue

Reproduction

1. Configure \plugins.allow\ with explicit plugin IDs in \openclaw.json\
2. Restart Gateway (\openclaw gateway stop && openclaw gateway start)
3. Observe logs during sidecar startup phase

Log Evidence (timestamps from 2026-04-22 00:29 CST)

\\

First successful load (main process) — works fine

[email protected]: plugin registered (model: qwen3-embedding:8b, smartExtraction: ON) node.list 4666ms ← normal

Sidecar starts — config inheritance breaks

[plugins] plugins.allow is empty; discovered non-bundled plugins may auto-load: memory-lancedb-pro, openclaw-weixin [plugins] memory-lancedb-pro invalid config: embedding: must have required property 'embedding'

Cascading failures

node.list 75125ms ← blocked for 75 seconds! retriever.test() timed out after 8000ms node.list 29581ms ← still slow

3rd attempt finally succeeds

[email protected]: plugin registered (model: qwen3-embedding:8b, smartExtraction: ON) node.list 53ms ← back to normal

Pattern repeats ~2 hours later with same cascade (95925ms node.list block)

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Root Cause Analysis

In \server.impl-BbJvXoPb.js, the sidecar channel startup path calls \warnWhenAllowlistIsOpen()\ before the full config normalization is complete. The sidecar receives a raw config object where \plugins.allow\ has not yet been resolved from the normalized config.

This is related to the same split-context bug fixed for \openclaw status\ (PR #62106), but the gateway startup/sidecar loader path was not covered by that fix.

Suggested Fix

1. Ensure \warnWhenAllowlistIsOpen()\ is called only after config normalization completes in the sidecar path (same fix as PR #62106, extended to gateway loader)
2. Alternatively, pass the raw \plugins.allow\ array directly to the validation function as a fallback
3. The \embedding\ schema validation should also be deferred until config normalization is complete

Impact

• Functional: None — plugins eventually load and work correctly
• Performance: ~106s added to every Gateway restart
• Observability: Misleading error logs that suggest configuration problems when none exist