Gateway
Restart recovery
Restarting the gateway does not lose agent state. Conversations, transcripts, scheduled jobs, background task records, and queued outbound messages all live on disk, and work that was interrupted mid-turn is detected and resumed automatically after the gateway comes back up. No manual intervention is required, and there is nothing to configure: recovery is always on.
This page describes what survives a restart, how interrupted work is detected, and what the automatic resume looks like.
What survives a restart
| State | Storage | Behavior across restart |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation history | JSONL transcripts + per-agent session store on disk | Untouched; sessions continue from the stored transcript |
| Interrupted main-session turn | Recovery markers in the session store | Automatically resumed a few seconds after startup |
| Subagent runs | SQLite (shared state database) | Registry restored on boot; interrupted runs resumed |
| Background tasks | SQLite (shared state database) | Reconciled on boot; orphaned runs recovered or marked lost |
| Queued outbound deliveries | SQLite delivery queue | Drained after restart; undelivered replies are retried |
| Scheduled (cron) jobs | SQLite cron store | Schedules persist; the scheduler re-arms on boot |
| Restart continuation | SQLite restart sentinel | One-shot follow-up dispatched to the session that asked for the restart |
Graceful restarts drain first
A requested restart (openclaw gateway restart, a config change that requires
a restart, or a gateway update) does not kill in-flight work immediately. The
gateway stops accepting new work, then waits for active agent turns and
background tasks to finish, up to a drain budget (5 minutes by default). Most
restarts therefore interrupt nothing at all.
Only work that cannot finish inside the drain budget (or any run interrupted by a forced restart or a crash) is aborted — and before that happens, each affected session is marked for recovery.
How interrupted work is detected
Two complementary mechanisms mark sessions whose turn did not finish:
- At shutdown: during the restart drain, every session with an active run is stamped with a recovery marker in the session store before the run is aborted.
- At startup: the gateway scans session stores for sessions that still claim to be running but have no live owner in the new process. This catches hard crashes and kills where no shutdown code ran. Stale transcript lock files are cleaned up at the same time.
Automatic resume
A few seconds after startup, the gateway re-dispatches each marked session with a synthetic system message telling the agent its previous turn was interrupted by a restart and to continue from the existing transcript. If a final reply had already been produced but not delivered, its text is included so the agent can deliver it instead of redoing the work. Recovery retries up to 3 times with exponential backoff.
Before resuming, the gateway checks that the transcript tail is safe to continue from. If it is not (for example, the turn ended on a stale pending approval), the session is not blindly re-run; the agent instead posts a short notice asking the user to resend the last request.
Subagents
Subagent runs are persisted in the shared SQLite state database, so the subagent registry survives the process. On boot the registry is restored and interrupted subagent sessions are resumed with their original task context. Two safety valves apply:
- Runs interrupted more than 2 hours ago are finalized instead of resumed, so a gateway that was down overnight does not resurrect stale work.
- A session that repeatedly fails to recover is tombstoned as wedged so recovery cannot loop forever.
Background tasks
The background task registry is SQLite-backed and reconciled on boot and on a periodic interval: durable outcomes recorded by finished runs are recovered, and runs whose owning process disappeared are marked lost after a grace period instead of hanging forever.
Agent-requested restarts
When the agent itself triggers a restart (applying a config change, updating the gateway, or an explicit restart request), a restart sentinel is written to SQLite before the process exits. After boot the gateway posts the outcome back to the originating chat and dispatches a one-shot continuation turn so the agent picks up exactly where it left off, on the same channel and thread.
Safety valves and observability
- Crash-loop breaker: 3 unclean boots within 5 minutes trip a breaker that suppresses auto-start side services on the next boot, so a crashing gateway does not amplify itself. It recovers once the unclean-boot window drains.
- Metrics: recovery activity is exported via
Prometheus as
openclaw_session_recovery_totalandopenclaw_session_recovery_age_seconds. - Logs: recovery decisions are logged under the
main-session-restart-recoveryandsubagent-interrupted-resumesubsystems.
What is not resumed
- Sessions excluded from main-session recovery because another owner already handles them: subagent sessions (subagent recovery), cron sessions (the scheduler re-runs on schedule), and ACP-managed sessions (the connected IDE or client owns the resume).
- Sessions whose transcript tail cannot be safely continued; these get the resend notice described above instead of a silent re-run.
- Work that was never admitted: messages arriving during the drain window are rejected with an explicit restart error rather than silently queued into a dying process.
