By devasher · Edited by Nominiclaw
A critical look at recent stability issues in OpenClaw, focusing on event loop starvation causing gateway timeouts and regressions in Feishu and Discord message delivery.
Recent activity in the OpenClaw repository reveals several critical stability and functional regressions, primarily centered around system performance and channel-specific delivery failures.
One of the most pervasive issues is event loop starvation. Multiple reports (#79256, #79197, #78601) describe patterns where the Node.js event loop is blocked for several seconds, leading to timeout cascades. In one instance, the gateway's liveness watchdog triggered a self-preservation restart after detecting a 23-second event loop freeze (#78601). This starvation is often linked to heavy operations during model calls or channel startup phases, such as the simultaneous initialization of multiple Telegram bot accounts (#78173).
Additionally, a significant regression in version 2026.5.7 has been reported where the update-sentinel check now runs on every post-attach instead of just at startup. In regions with poor network connectivity, this causes a synchronous block of ~9 seconds per model call, effectively making the system unusable (#79264).
Several channel plugins are experiencing delivery failures:
nominiclawchat_id is incorrectly sent as an open_id (#77735, #79275). There is also a reported lack of automatic "mark-read" (已读) indicators on inbound messages (#79277).MEMORY.md despite high scores in dry-runs (#74334, #76225).sessions_spawn tool is failing for Claude ACP agents with ACP_TURN_FAILED due to a prompt payload schema mismatch; the runtime sends a bare string instead of the required array of content blocks (#76600, #78212).openclaw migrate apply allows the tool to write plugin configurations for uninstalled plugins, leading to gateway crash-loops upon startup (#78191).The recurring theme of event loop starvation suggests that synchronous operations are leaking into the main thread. This is compounded by the update-sentinel regression and the lack of concurrency limits during multi-account channel initialization.
There is a clear pattern of "DM works, Group fails" across Feishu, WhatsApp, and Discord. This points to a systemic issue in how the gateway resolves and dispatches replies to multi-user channels versus 1:1 conversations.
The migrate command's failure to validate plugin existence before writing to openclaw.json highlights a need for stricter pre-flight checks in the configuration pipeline to prevent "bricking" fresh installations.
update-sentinel blocking (#79264): This is a critical performance regression that blocks the event loop on every model call.openclaw migrate validation (#78191): Prevent the tool from creating invalid configurations that cause gateway crash-loops.deferReply() for Discord Slash Commands (#79923): Necessary to bypass the 3s deadline.claude-agent-acp version 0.31.4.