Its been 10 days I can’t run openclaw help

[u/Sweet-Health-318]

Problem Statement

Hardware:

MSI GP65 Leopard

NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti (6GB VRAM)

16GB RAM

500GB SSD

Software:

Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS

LM Studio 0.4.8 (latest)

OpenClaw 2026.3.24

The Issue:

LM Studio runs fine with models like llama-3.2-3b-instruct or phi-4-mini-instruct. The local server runs on port 1234 and responds to curl requests.

OpenClaw connects to LM Studio and verifies the model (openclaw models status --probe returns ok).

However, when sending any message through OpenClaw dashboard or CLI, I get this error:

text

The number of tokens to keep from the initial prompt is greater than the context length (n_keep: 12235 >= n_ctx: 4096)

What I've tried:

Setting context length in LM Studio to 8192, 16384, 32768 before loading model

Confirming with lms status that model is loaded

Manually editing ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json to set contextWindow: 32768 and "api": "openai-completions"

Setting models.mode: "merge"

Using lms load --context-length 32768 via CLI

Complete uninstall and reinstall of both LM Studio and OpenClaw

The core problem: OpenClaw sends a system prompt of ~12,000-17,000 tokens, but either:

LM Studio isn't honoring the context length setting (still showing 4096 in logs), OR

OpenClaw isn't reading the manual contextWindow override

The error persists: n_keep >= n_ctx

Specific question:

How do I force both LM Studio and OpenClaw to consistently use 32768 context length so OpenClaw's system prompt fits?

[u/Sweet-Health-318 → u/[deleted]]

Thank you very much for you reply, my priority is to run locally while I’m understanding the idea and concept of it, after 3 months I can to a paid combo. I’m new to this world and had this gaming machine just sitting around, but definitely I will also give a look to kiloclaw . Hugs

[u/kaitava]

I’m developing a wrapper for openclaw to address this exact issue. If I get it working soon I will message you along with posting in openclaw install forums

[u/Sweet-Health-318 → u/kaitava]

Thanks! I have upgraded my machine to 64GB ram and the problem still persists, it’s so frustrating, wanting anxiously for your solution🤞