Brad Mills 🔑⚡️

Last night my agent told me this would speed things up. I pressed my agent to explain WHY this morning. What he ended up saying was that this cleanup has no effect. How sessions.json actually works according to my bot reading the docs: Sessions.json is cached and your bot reads from disk cache with a 45-second TTL. The flow: 1. First read: readFileSync > JSON.parse > result stored in an in-memory Map 2. Subsequent reads within 45s: returns the cached clone > no disk read, no parse 3. Cache invalidates if: TTL expires, file mtime changes, or file size changes 4. On invalidation: re-reads from disk, re-parses, re-caches So the answer to "does it parse on every startup/lookup" is no. It parses once, caches for 45 seconds, and only re-parses if the file actually changed. Dozens of session lookups per minute hit the in-memory cache, not the filesystem. Other relevant details from the source docs...this process already happens: • Default rotate threshold: 10 MB (DEFAULT_SESSION_ROTATE_BYTES) ... when sessions.json exceeds 10 MB, OpenClaw rotates it to .bak.{timestamp} & keeps only the 3 most recent backups. • Default max entries: 500 • Default prune-after: 720 hours (30 days) So for my 5.3 MB file, it's under the rotation threshold, parsed once every 45 seconds at most. So yes this file grows constantly! Every cron fire, every inbound message, every subagent spawn triggers updateSessionStore. If you have ~100 cron fires/day plus your messages to your bot & subagents, that's easily 200-400+\ writes/day. But that's all disk related not context related. I pressed my bot on Opus 4.6 high if this was causing context bloat and his answer was: "No. sessions.json is not injected into the prompt. sessions.json is a routing index — it maps session keys to metadata (which session file to load, what model to use, delivery context, token counts). It's used server-side by the gateway to figure out where to send your message. The LLM never sees it." So I'm now even more confused...do we need to bother doing this or will OpenClaw take care of this naturally with the automatic rotation & pruning process? I guess I should look at who exactly wrote this code and then try to ask them directly ...

My bot is even more unresponsive this morning. My first message to him died from context overload. All I said was: "the computer restarted, can you make sure all of our services are online?" The run died from a 1.5 million token prompt. Another day of debugging for me.

IF YOU'RE ON OPENCLAW DO THIS NOW: I just sped up my OpenClaw by 95% with a single prompt Over the past week my claw has been unbelievably slow. Turns out the output of EVERY cron job gets loaded into context Months of cron outputs sent with every message Do this prompt now: "Check how many session files are in ~/.openclaw/agents/main/sessions/ and how big sessions.json is. If there are thousands of old cron session files bloating it, delete all the old .jsonl files except the main session, then rebuild sessions.json to only reference sessions that still exist on disk." This will delete all the session data around your cron outputs. If you do a ton of cron jobs, this is a tremendous amount of bloat that does not need to be loaded into context and is MAJORLY slowing down your Openclaw If you for some reason want to keep some of this cron session data in memory, then don't have your openclaw delete ALL of them. But for me, I have all the outputs automatically save to a Convex database anyway, so there was no reason to keep it all in context. Instantly sped up my OpenClaw from unusable to lightning quick