question: openclaw 2026.4.24 and above have stability and performance issues on low spec hardware

[jata1]

Topic

Installation

Add-on version

n/a

Access mode (if relevant)

lan_https

Your question

Hey @techartdev - thought you should know that I have reverted to openclaw 2026.4.23 as I have had a load of trouble with all versions from 2026.4.24.

The issue is mainly related to performance and stability on low spec setups. I am running HA and OC on a N100 minipc. I think lots of HA community are in a similar situation so you might need to keep an eye on this in terms of stability and performance of the OC plugin

What have you already tried?

No response

Relevant logs / errors (optional)

Extra context (optional)

No response

[techartdev]

@jata1 Hey!

What is actually happening? Is it running slow or crashing? Can you add some context, so I can take a look if we can improve something on our end.

[NewFolk]

Might be related to openclaw/openclaw#76562

[Nosdave]

Same boat here — HA Green, 4 GB ARM64. Already painful at 4.27 (chronic Telegram stalls). Jumped to 4.29 hoping it would fix things; got worse — couldn't even cold-boot. The plugin-runtime-deps staging on first boot is an npm install storm that spikes RSS by 1.5+ GB before the gateway opens its port. Trimming unused bundled extensions only helped partway; the gateway core's 35 own specs alone tip 4 GB over.
Pinned a Dockerfile fork to 2026.4.15 (last known good version on my machine) — boots in 5 min, ~500 MB steady, survived the daily HA backup running in parallel. 8h+ stable now. Will check how far up in version I can go.
+1 to jata1. Scope isn't just N100 — anything ≤4 GB seems hit since the staging architecture change.

[jata1]

2026.5.2 is much better but it is hard to keep up with changes to openclaw. It is moving very fast. Good fun but not on low spec hardware.

[jjuarez2534]

Same issue here — HA Green, 4GB ARM64, running 2026.4.26 as HAOS add-on.

Experiencing three stacking issues on every startup:

• 60-second OpenRouter pricing fetch stall
• Repeated IPv6 fallbacks before settling on IPv4 (despite all IPv4 settings enabled — HAOS read-only filesystem blocks sysctl)
• setRawMode EIO CLI gateway connection failures falling back to embedded agent

Result: 7–16 minute delays on first interaction after startup. Filed separately as #128.

Good to know 2026.5.2 is better — will test. Also evaluating Docker on separate x86 hardware as the longer term fix per community recommendation.

[jjuarez2534]

Confirmed — also seeing this on HA Green 4GB ARM64 running 2026.4.26
(filed as #128). Upstream openclaw/openclaw#76562 confirms event loop
saturation as root cause. Holding at current version pending a fix.
Will move to Docker on x86 hardware (Beelink) with 2026.4.24 in the
interim.

[jata1]

@jata1 Hey!

What is actually happening? Is it running slow or crashing? Can you add some context, so I can take a look if we can improve something on our end.

For my setup, 2026.4.24 - 2026.4.29 did not play nice. Start up took 3-4 mins before gateway was available. whatsapp channel was trying to restart every few minutes. This process was smashing the CPU.

2026.4.23 was fine and I am now running 2026.5.2 and this is much better. I am running 2026.5.2 using my new image build from openclaw base so not sure if this is related to better stability

[techartdev]

Guys, 2026.5.2 should be better and I saw comments in the openclaw repo in support of that. So better is to update to latest AddOn version if you already installed the bad one.