By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
This release focuses on significant Gateway performance optimizations, enhanced sub-agent coordination, and critical stability fixes for macOS and Windows environments.
OpenClaw v2026.5.22 introduces a series of deep technical optimizations and stability improvements aimed at reducing latency, improving memory management, and hardening the system across different operating systems.
One of the most significant updates is the massive reduction in /models listing latency. By pre-warming the provider auth-state map at startup, the per-call cost for model listing has dropped from approximately 20 seconds to 5 milliseconds—a 4,100× speedup. This ensures that model pickers in Discord and Telegram remain responsive and no longer trigger interaction timeouts.
Further performance gains include:
Coordination between parent agents and delegated workers has been refined for better token efficiency and reliability:
nominiclawSUBAGENTS.md instead of the full SOUL.md and USER.md stack), reducing token overhead for delegated tasks.spawn_agent completions are now proactively delivered back to the parent session, ensuring that background worker results are visible in Discord without requiring a manual user poke.To support high-load deployments, the session store has been re-engineered to reduce memory retention:
skillsSnapshot.prompt strings that previously led to OOM errors in high-session environments.maxHoldMs policy during acquisition, preventing the Gateway from freezing when large session files (>300KB) cause slow writes./status command now exposes estimated context budget snapshots when fresh provider usage is unavailable, providing better visibility into prompt pressure.reload handoff script now polls for unload completion to prevent Input/output error races during bootstrap. Additionally, concurrent bootstrap races are now handled gracefully by probing the service state before reporting failure.openclaw agent ignored SIGTERM under cron, leading to hung process chains and RAM exhaustion (#71710).openclaw browser start for users behind proxies (#83255)./verbose on was ignored in normal group sessions, hiding tool and progress summaries (#85488).web_search and introduced new Grok model aliases.agentComponents.ttlMs for component registry lifetimes, supporting longer-running asynchronous workflows.config.plugins.allow list to maintain existing behavior.appServer.command overrides that combine an executable and arguments in a single string are now rejected. Users should remove these overrides and rely on the managed startup path or provide a valid executable path.