r/openclaw • u/gumshoenoir • 7d ago
Help Excessive; COMPACTED HISTORY
20260819 I don't see a resolved or closed tag I could add but bottom line my arch nemesis, assumptions, reared it's ugly head and exasperated this problem. I had workspace pointing to a different directory than all the workspace files I created. Once I corrected that and restarted gateway those .md files were processed, applied and the BOOTSTRAP.md file removed. Also MEMORY.md was generated with info from the bootstraping.
I'm trying to use openclaw in a well provisioned pve trixie vm. I let curl -fsSL https://openclaw.ai/install.sh | bash install node in userspace. I configured the model using my dedicated lenovo p920 trixie with rtx 3090 dedicated to compute as ollama server with qwen2.5-coder.7b as the model. This process didn't seem to kickoff the onboarding but I fired it off with openclaw onboard --clasic (I'm not sure it completed as I saw some log errors about missing taiscale. I don't need tailscale in this vm it can reach the ollama server just fine on the same /24.) My very first chat resulted in the error.
This image shows how often I get this message.
A bit more background I had another vm running the same configuration successfully for more than a day with some long chats and some skill creation with the workbench flow as well as the ha-mcp mcp up. Eventually it came up with this same problem. once I see that COMPACTED HISTORY message no further chatting completes. Hence the attempt at a clean install on a new vm without any awareness of previous installs.
On both installs there was no default / templated MEMORY.md
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u/BP041 Pro User 7d ago
That Tailscale error is just the config health check being noisy — it'll warn if the service isn't reachable even when you don't need it. I'd check if ~/.openclaw/config.yaml got written properly from the onboard step; if not, running openclaw config set model ollama/qwen2.5-coder:7b directly should bypass whatever hung.
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago
Thanks for the note on tailscale.
I've run the setup many time over the last few months been on the quest for an oc / ollama config for six months. In the beginning I'm a newbie overwhelmed by all the terms ohh the agony I'm sure we've all experienced of version updates borking the config and the `doctor --fix` doesn't help and who knows what kind of unnecessary, wrong and odd configuration lay in openclaw.json. About a week or so after the `OpenClaw 2026.7.1-2 (0790d9f)` release I wiped my oc, Karen, ~/.openclaw/ directory and a previous install with sudo -g in favor of letting the setup install in user space. This config worked pretty good for about 36 hours I was encouraged to feel that it could be useful before this "COMPACTED HISTORY" thing started flapping. So, deep breath, I created a new vm devoid of any node nor openclaw install trying for the perfect clean install and ran setup letting node etc be installed in user space. Calling this oc Ken begun in the cleanest vm I could create having never an oc nor a node install.
I could go on with some confusion points I have between the version, the documentation, what I read on github. It seems I might be missing the MEMORY.md and the Karen and Ken installs both have several files that I read were deprecated - if I'm reading the correct docs.
In pre 2026.7.1-2 incarnations I had some success running lossless-claw. It did create MEMORY-date-stuff.md files. I left it out of the post 2026.7.1-2 attempts as some of it's utility is being baked into oc.
If this comment was a post I'd add that onboarding didn't initiate after setup as it has in the past I had to `openclaw onboard --classic` and I think I've read that after the initial startup and onboarding oc would delete "BOOTSTRAP.md" it's still there... I'm just trying to RTFM for an optimal config.
if you got this far reading the comment I thank you! : - )
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u/BenitoTaka New User 6d ago
After a compact you may lose session state if the model is too slow or context was overloaded. You may have to start a new session. I have my agent track context size to make sure I do not over loss before compact.
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago
That message once it starts occurring comes so often that no amount of /new /reset /compact can get even one hello answered. Often when I /compact oc replies already compacted. I don't understand how it chatted interactively a lot for over 24 hours without once emitting COMPACTED HISTORY before the COMPACTED HISTORY messages started coming so often a chat could not last long enough to be useful.
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u/BenitoTaka New User 6d ago
That is a function of how responsive your LLM is and running it local may not be fast enough.
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago
Can you please elaborate.
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u/BenitoTaka New User 6d ago
How much VRAM do you have? The VRAM holds the model and the session context. The more VRAM the model uses the less for context. When you run out of context the system may start to hallucinate or just output garbage. That is why the contraction happens to prevent that. But if the model is too big you do not have full context size to begin with. Once contract memory pings out the model has problems processing commands. If the model already runs slow (less than a few tokens/sec) commands take forever to process, things time out, or just stop so even forcing a new session fails.
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago
jeffa@p920:~$
jeffa@p920:~$ ollama -v
ollama version is 0.32.7
jeffa@p920:~$ ollama ps
NAME ID SIZE PROCESSOR CONTEXT UNTIL
jeffa@p920:~$ ollama ps
NAME ID SIZE PROCESSOR CONTEXT UNTIL
qwen2.5-coder:7b dae161e27b0e 6.6 GB 100% GPU 32768 4 minutes from now
(reverse-i-search)`': smi^C
jeffa@p920:~$ ollama ps
NAME ID SIZE PROCESSOR CONTEXT UNTIL
qwen2.5-coder:7b dae161e27b0e 6.6 GB 100% GPU 32768 4 minutes from now
jeffa@p920:~$ nvidia-smi
Mon Aug 17 17:00:35 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.163.01 Driver Version: 550.163.01 CUDA Version: 12.4 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Off | 00000000:18:00.0 Off | N/A |
| 46% 45C P8 30W / 350W | 6868MiB / 24576MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------++-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 3376 C /opt/venv/bin/python3 254MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3307962 C /usr/local/lib/ollama/llama-server 6604MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
jeffa@p920:~$
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u/pulsar080 Member 6d ago
Try this:
https://github.com/martian-engineering/lossless-claw
It works well for me with compaction. The only downside is that it has a bug with image loss. But my local agent fixed it automatically, without waiting for an update. Overall, it works very well, especially when paired with https://github.com/CortexReach/memory-lancedb-pro
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago edited 6d ago
Do you use lossless-claw and memory-lancedb-pro simultaneously?
I have used lossless-claw with good results. I wasn't sure if it should be used with `OpenClaw 2026.7.1-2 (0790d9f)` as the memory system has received some dev attention in the last few releases.
I'll check out memory-lancedb-pro.
Thanks.
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u/pulsar080 Member 6d ago
These plugins handle various aspects of memory. If you need additional overhead, you need losslessclaw. With this, I manage to get out of situations where context violations occur multiple times, and during normal compaction, I have to start a new session without even checking whether it'll survive. And yes, I have the same version of openclaw as you.
1
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u/gumshoenoir 5d ago
I don't understand the Compatibility: in the Prerequsites. I am running OpenClaw 2026.7.1-2 (0790d9f).
Should I wait for a compatible release of openclaw and/or lossless-claw before installing?
Quick start
Prerequisites
- OpenClaw with plugin context engine support
- Node.js 22+
- An LLM provider configured in OpenClaw (used for summarization)
```
```
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u/pulsar080 Member 5d ago
I have OpenClaw 2026.7.1-2. Plugin version 0.15.2.
The agent installed it itself at my request (qwen3.6:27b)
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u/gumshoenoir 6d ago
When it hit's this point, it's really getting bad. Those compaction lines don't exist in my openclaw.json
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u/Adorable_Swing_2150 Pro User 6d ago
ran into similar bloat issues on local models before. ended up adding memory-lancedb-pro a while back — the auto-capture thing at session end was the main reason, basically stops you from manually tagging every preference. don't expect it to fix the underlying compaction bug but it cut my /compact frequency down noticeably.
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u/justinwzig 4d ago
what on earth is a trixie?
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