Description

Daily session reset (mode: "daily", atHour: 4 UTC) stopped working after upgrading from OC 4.5 to 4.14. Sessions that were idle 12+ hours are not resetting, and /status never shows 0 context tokens on daily boundary.

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.4.15 (previously 4.5, then 4.14)
• Discord multi-agent setup (6 agents)
• Heartbeats enabled on all agents (15m to 12h intervals)
• lossless-claw 0.9.1 as context engine
• Default session config (no explicit reset policy)

Expected Behavior

Sessions should reset daily at 4 AM UTC (midnight ET). When reset triggers:

1. /status should show 0 context tokens
2. Session transcript starts fresh
3. Context engine (LCM) receives session_end hook, archives old conversation

This worked correctly on OC 4.5 from Mar 25 through Apr 14. LCM database shows conversation splits every 1-3 days during this period.

Actual Behavior

After upgrading to 4.14 (and persisting through 4.15), sessions never reset:

• Agent sessions persist for 3+ days without resetting
• Agents with 15-min heartbeat intervals (which worked fine on 4.5) no longer reset
• /status always shows accumulated context, never drops to 0

Evidence from LCM Database

Same session key agent:main:discord:channel:... has 7 conversations:

• Conv 290: Mar 25 – Apr 8 (reset worked, OC 4.5)
• Conv 681: Apr 8 – Apr 9 (reset worked, OC 4.5)
• Conv 687: Apr 9 – Apr 11 (reset worked, OC 4.5)
• Conv 712: Apr 12 – Apr 14 (reset worked, OC 4.5)
• Conv 726: Apr 14 – Apr 17 (never reset, OC 4.14+)
• Conv 751: Apr 17 – now (created by volume swap, not daily reset)

Resets clearly stopped on Apr 14 when OC 4.14 was installed.

Related Issues

• [Bug]: Group/channel sessions never reset daily (updatedAt bumped before freshness check) #21161 (closed as stale, never fixed) — same root cause: updatedAt bumped before freshness check
• Idle session reset (idleMinutes) never triggers — updateLastRoute bumps updatedAt before freshness check #11520 (closed as stale) — idle reset variant of same bug
• PR fix(session): prevent updateLastRoute from bypassing idle reset (#11520) #11580 (closed without merge) — attempted fix
• PR Preserve daily reset timestamps for inbound session metadata updates #22887 (closed without merge) — attempted fix

Likely Root Cause

The session init path in 4.14+ calls mergeSessionEntry which sets updatedAt = Math.max(..., Date.now()) before evaluateSessionFreshness() checks whether entry.updatedAt < dailyResetAt. Since updatedAt is already "now", the session is never stale.

This appears to be a regression — OC 4.5 either checked freshness before bumping updatedAt, or used a different code path for the daily check.