Describe what you're trying to do and what's happening instead: I am facing two major stability issues after updating to OpenClaw 2026.4.26 on my server.
- Massive Startup Freeze: When booting the gateway, logs hang completely on [gateway] starting channels and sidecars... for 4 to 7 minutes before finally showing [gateway] ready.
- Crash/Timeout on Every Message: Whenever a message is sent to the bot, it gets stuck in state=processing for 200s+. This blocks the Node event loop, causing Discord heartbeats to fail and crashing the gateway with a 1006 / socket hang up error loop.
Mention your setup:
- Hosting: Pterodactyl Panel (Docker container)
- Node Version: v24.14.0
- Version: OpenClaw 2026.4.26
- Providers/Plugins used: discord, openrouter, brave and a custom MCP-like memory plugin (memory-openmemory).
What I investigated and tested (without success):
- Versions: This behavior started precisely after upgrading from version 2026.4.15 (everything > .15 is broken for me).
- Custom Plugins: Fully disabled my custom memory plugin (memory-openmemory). No improvement.
- LLMs: Tested swapping primary/fallback models (Gemini vs DeepSeek vs Gemma). No improvement.
- Cache clearing: Wiped the entire ~/.openclaw directory to ensure no state/runtime-deps pollution. No improvement.
- Session Bloat: Pruned agents' storage from 150+ bloated JSON sessions down to 15 entries. No improvement.
- RAG File Scan: Removed massive directories (projects/**/*.md) from the agent's memorySearch.extraPaths. No improvement.
- IPv6 Blackhole: Attempted forcing IPv4 DNS resolution via NODE_OPTIONS. No improvement.
Relevant logs:
// 1. Startup freeze
11:45:19 [gateway] starting channels and sidecars...
11:52:48 [gateway] ready
// 2. Message crash loop
11:57:45 [diagnostic] stuck session: state=processing age=149s queueDepth=1
11:59:15 [discord] connect error: gateway request timeout for connect
11:59:15 [discord] gateway: Gateway websocket closed: 1006
Relevant openclaw.json:
{
"gateway": {
"port": 7009,
"mode": "local",
"auth": { "mode": "token", "token": "REDACTED" }
},
"plugins": {
"allow": ["discord", "memory-openmemory", "brave", "openrouter"],
"slots": { "memory": "memory-openmemory" }
}
}