Best practices for long-running main session compaction?
Since the main agent session is continuous (always-on, single persistent conversation), it inevitably hits context limits and gets compacted. A few things I've noticed:
1. After compaction, recent conversational context is lost — the summary preserves decisions/facts but not the tail end of the conversation
2. After a gateway restart (e.g. config patch), an older message got re-delivered instead of the most recent one — possibly related to compaction timing?
3. In Claude Code, the advice is to start fresh after a few compactions rather than chain summaries. But with OpenClaw's main session there's no natural reset point.
Questions:
• Is there a way to trigger a clean session reset for the main agent without losing continuity? (Memory files handle persistence anyway)
• Any best practices for managing compaction in long-running sessions?
• Is the "replayed wrong message after restart" a known issue, or related to compaction?
Running OpenClaw 2026.2.9, main session was at ~150k/200k tokens when it compacted.
1. After compaction, recent conversational context is lost — the summary preserves decisions/facts but not the tail end of the conversation
2. After a gateway restart (e.g. config patch), an older message got re-delivered instead of the most recent one — possibly related to compaction timing?
3. In Claude Code, the advice is to start fresh after a few compactions rather than chain summaries. But with OpenClaw's main session there's no natural reset point.
Questions:
• Is there a way to trigger a clean session reset for the main agent without losing continuity? (Memory files handle persistence anyway)
• Any best practices for managing compaction in long-running sessions?
• Is the "replayed wrong message after restart" a known issue, or related to compaction?
Running OpenClaw 2026.2.9, main session was at ~150k/200k tokens when it compacted.
The AI that actually does things. Emails, calendar, home automation - all from your favorite chat app. New shell, ready to help. The lobster way.
134,827Members
Resources
Similar Threads
Was this page helpful?
