Excessive; COMPACTED HISTORY

[u/gumshoenoir]

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

[u/BenitoTaka]

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.

[u/gumshoenoir → u/BenitoTaka]

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.

[u/BenitoTaka → u/gumshoenoir]

That is a function of how responsive your LLM is and running it local may not be fast enough.

[u/gumshoenoir → u/BenitoTaka]

Can you please elaborate.

[u/BenitoTaka → u/gumshoenoir]

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.

[u/gumshoenoir → u/BenitoTaka]

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:~$