How to Manage OpenClaw Sessions and Context Pruning

# Session lifecycle phases:
#
# 1. Active: User is actively conversing (last message < 5 min ago)
#    - Full context retained
#    - No pruning
#
# 2. Idle: User paused (5 min < last message < 1 hour)
#    - Light pruning eligible
#    - Keep recent N messages
#
# 3. Stale: Likely abandoned (1 hour < last message < 24 hours)
#    - Aggressive pruning
#    - Keep only critical context
#
# 4. Expired: Definitely abandoned (last message > 24 hours)
#    - Archive to cold storage
#    - Remove from active memory

# Check session status:
openclaw admin sessions list --status active
openclaw admin sessions list --status stale --older-than 1h

# In config/sessions/lifecycle.yaml:
session_lifecycle:
  ttl:
    active: 1h      # Keep in memory for 1 hour of inactivity
    idle: 24h       # Move to disk after 24 hours
    archived: 90d   # Delete archives after 90 days

  cleanup:
    enabled: true
    schedule: "0 * * * *"  # Run hourly
    batch_size: 100

  persistence:
    active_sessions: memory
    idle_sessions: redis
    archived_sessions: s3

# In config/sessions/redis.yaml:
redis:
  host: localhost
  port: 6379
  db: 0
  key_prefix: "openclaw:session:"
  ttl_seconds: 86400  # 24 hours

# In config/context/limits.yaml:
context_limits:
  claude-opus-4:
    max_tokens: 200000
    warning_threshold: 180000  # Warn at 90%
    hard_limit: 195000         # Start pruning at 97.5%

  claude-sonnet-3.5:
    max_tokens: 200000
    warning_threshold: 180000
    hard_limit: 195000

  # Default for unknown models:
  default:
    max_tokens: 100000
    warning_threshold: 90000
    hard_limit: 95000

# Per-user overrides:
user_limits:
  alice@example.com:
    max_tokens: 200000  # Power user
  bob@example.com:
    max_tokens: 50000   # Limited user

# In config/context/pruning.yaml:
pruning:
  enabled: true

  strategy: hybrid  # "fifo", "relevance", "hybrid"

  # FIFO: Remove oldest messages first (simple, predictable)
  fifo:
    keep_recent: 50  # Always keep last 50 messages

  # Relevance: Use embeddings to keep most relevant messages
  relevance:
    enabled: true
    model: text-embedding-3-small
    similarity_threshold: 0.7
    keep_top_n: 30

  # Hybrid: FIFO but always keep high-relevance messages
  hybrid:
    fifo_weight: 0.3
    relevance_weight: 0.7
    min_keep: 20      # Always keep at least 20 messages
    max_keep: 100     # Never exceed 100 messages

  # Message importance rules:
  importance:
    - type: system_message
      priority: high      # Never prune system messages
    - type: code_output
      priority: medium
    - type: chat
      priority: low

# In config/sessions/archiving.yaml:
archiving:
  enabled: true

  triggers:
    - type: age
      older_than: 7d
      action: archive
    - type: inactivity
      inactive_for: 24h
      action: archive
    - type: size
      larger_than: 1mb
      action: compress_and_archive

  storage:
    provider: s3
    s3:
      bucket: openclaw-session-archives
      region: us-east-1
      prefix: sessions/

  compression:
    enabled: true
    format: gzip

  retrieval:
    allow_restore: true
    restore_ttl: 24h  # Restored sessions expire after 24h

# Archive old sessions manually:
openclaw admin sessions archive --older-than 7d

# Restore archived session:
openclaw admin sessions restore --session-id sess_abc123

# In config/monitoring/context.yaml:
context_monitoring:
  enabled: true

  metrics:
    - type: context_size
      per: session
      interval: 1m
    - type: pruning_events
      per: session
      interval: 1h
    - type: token_usage
      per: user
      interval: 1h

  alerts:
    - metric: context_size
      threshold: 180000
      action: notify_user
    - metric: pruning_frequency
      threshold: 5
      window: 1h
      action: investigate

# View context usage:
openclaw admin context stats --session sess_abc123

# Show pruning history:
openclaw admin context pruning-log --session sess_abc123

# Export context metrics:
openclaw admin context export --format json > context-metrics.json