OpenClaw Update: Solving Session Continuity and Gateway Stability

The latest set of merged pull requests for OpenClaw addresses a mix of critical stability bugs, architectural refactors, and user-facing feature enhancements. Key highlights include a significant fix for session continuity in Telegram DM topics and a resolution for a severe CPU-spin regression affecting Raspberry Pi 4 users.

Merged PRs

• [codex] Fix Telegram DM topic session routing #88421
• fix: clarify generated media reply prompts #88458
• fix(auth): bound inherited oauth expiry #88427
• refactor(cron): split service timer helpers #88461
• fix(heartbeat): advance stale scheduler deferrals #88462
• [codex] fix webchat full-message reader for truncated history #84670
• refactor: extract normalization core package #88459

Key Changes

Session Continuity and Routing

One of the most impactful changes is the fix for Telegram proactive DM-topic session routing. Previously, when a cron job initiated a message to a Telegram DM topic, the outbound session key differed from the key generated when a user replied to that same thread. This caused a break in session continuity, meaning the agent would lose context of the conversation it had just started.

By aligning outbound Telegram direct-topic session keys with inbound routing (using the chatId:threadId suffix), OpenClaw now ensures that proactive messages and user replies share the same scoped session key, while still preserving numeric topic IDs for delivery metadata.

Gateway Stability and Performance

OpenClaw has resolved a critical P1 bug where the gateway process would pin CPU at 100%+ on Raspberry Pi 4 (ARM64) hardware. This regression caused the Node.js event loop to starve, leading to permanent Telegram polling stalls and gateway crashes.

The gateway heartbeat scheduler can hot-loop when every due agent either returns a terminal skip without advancing nextDueMs or is deferred by a non-retry cooldown/flood gate while nextDueMs is already stale.

The fix involves advancing stale scheduler deferrals, ensuring that non-retryable terminal skips and flood deferrals advance the agent's due slot so the scheduler does not continuously rearm at 0ms.

User Experience and UI Enhancements

To address "message loss" perceptions in the WebChat UI, a new bounded chat.message.get RPC has been introduced. Previously, the side reader only displayed the already-loaded truncated text from the chat history. Now, the UI can fetch the full display-normalized transcript entry on demand, allowing users to read long assistant replies without increasing the default payload cap for the entire chat history.

Technical Refactors and Security

• Normalization Core: Shared normalization and coercion helpers have been extracted into a private workspace package (@openclaw/normalization-core) to clean up internal boundaries and improve build efficiency.
• Auth Profiles: A fix was implemented to treat inherited OAuth expiry comparisons as valid date timestamps, preventing child-agent auth stores from persisting invalid or out-of-range expiry dates.
• Cron Service: The cron timer helper concerns were split into focused service modules (watchdog cleanup, failure alerts, etc.) to improve maintainability.

Impact

For users running OpenClaw on ARM64 devices, this update restores essential stability and prevents the CPU-spin loops that previously rendered the gateway unusable. For developers utilizing automated cron-driven workflows on Telegram, the fix to session routing ensures that agents can now maintain state and context across proactive outreach and user responses.

Finally, the WebChat improvements significantly enhance the readability of long-form agent outputs, transforming truncated previews into actionable entry points for full content retrieval.