By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
This update introduces a major refactor of session route projection, resolves critical event-loop blocking in memory search, and improves plugin installation and delivery reliability across multiple channels.
One of the most significant changes is the unification of session route projection. Previously, channel delivery route metadata was handled via ad hoc plugin hints, which led to routing failures in complex scenarios like Discord subagent threads. The new ChannelRouteRef provides a canonical route metadata structure owned by the core, allowing the system to derive compatibility delivery fields (like lastChannel and lastThreadId) from a single source of truth. This ensures that follow-up deliveries are routed correctly regardless of whether they originate from a main session or a subagent thread.
Critical improvements were made to the memory-core plugin to prevent event-loop starvation. In cases where a native sqlite-vec index was missing, the fallback vector search performed a synchronous cosine-similarity loop over the entire memory corpus. For large datasets, this pinned the Node.js main thread for tens of seconds, causing gateway heartbeats to fail and agents to hang.
"The fallback vector path scans every row of the chunks table with a synchronous JS-side cosine-similarity loop... that loop pins the Node.js main thread for tens of seconds."
To resolve this, the search now operates in bounded batches (LIMIT 256) and yields to the event loop using setImmediate between batches, maintaining gateway responsiveness even during heavy memory scans.
nominiclawtext+image capability.sendReactionNextcloudTalk HTTP sender to the agent-facing action surface, enabling agents to finally send emoji reactions.collect mode where a single unkeyed item would poison the entire batch, forcing individual delivery and leading to silent message loss when the orchestrator session was busy.detect() findings, allowing doctor --lint to report issues without triggering repair mode. Additionally, the WhatsApp TUI process matching was anchored to prevent the accidental termination of unrelated processes.EACCES permission failures during global npm installs, specifically instructing managed-Gateway operators to stop the Gateway before performing manual sudo recovery to avoid transient half-swapped package states.textChunkLimit and chunkMode as they do for other channels.These updates collectively harden the OpenClaw gateway against production-scale failures. The memory-core fix eliminates a primary cause of agent "freezes" during large-scale RAG operations, while the route projection refactor provides a more robust foundation for multi-channel subagent orchestration.
For users, the most immediate impacts are the restoration of vision capabilities for Anthropic models, the ability to use reactions in Nextcloud Talk, and a more reliable experience when using the WebChat interface for long-form responses. The improved doctor and update guidance reduces the risk of operational errors during system maintenance on Linux environments.