Problem Summary

The memory-core plugin's dreaming feature and session-memory auto-dump mechanism caused severe memory bloat, leading to a Gateway crash with 3.7GB RSS memory usage.

Root Cause Analysis

Issue 1: Dreaming writes without cleanup

• The .dreams/ directory accumulated 7.8MB of data (149,224 lines in short-term-recall.json alone)
• Dream cleanup mechanism fails silently: narrative session cleanup failed for rem/light phase: missing scope: operator.admin
• This means dream writes data but never cleans it up — unbounded growth
• sqlite-vec unavailable causes vector recall degradation, possibly triggering redundant writes

Issue 2: session-memory plugin dumps raw conversation transcripts

• Error sessions (429 rate limits, OOM crashes, MCP config sessions) get dumped as raw conversation transcripts into the memory/ directory
• Filenames like *-provider-finish-reason-error-f.md, *-oom-debug.md, *-figma-mcp-setup.md
• These contain full user/assistant conversation transcripts with zero summarization
• Every startup/heartbeat/memory_search scans these files, burning massive tokens
• No deduplication or cleanup — 10+ redundant files accumulated

Issue 3: No user control

• Dreaming has no config option to disable it until we manually patched plugins.entries.memory-core.config.dreaming.enabled = false
• The default behavior is write-only with no cleanup, making it a ticking time bomb for all users

Impact

• Memory: Gateway RSS grew from ~500MB to 3.7GB before crashing
• Tokens: Every heartbeat/search loaded 7.8MB of junk, burning 100k+ tokens per invocation
• UX: Agent became slow, unresponsive, and eventually crashed requiring manual restart

Reproduction

1. Use OpenClaw with memory-core plugin enabled (default)
2. Let it run for ~1 week with regular heartbeats
3. Observe .dreams/ directory growth and memory/ directory filling with session dumps

Suggested Fixes

1. Fix dream cleanup permissions — the missing scope: operator.admin error indicates cleanup lacks proper permissions
2. Add a config toggle for dreaming that is OFF by default (or at least document it)
3. Cap .dreams file sizes — enforce maximum file size with automatic truncation
4. Session-memory should summarize, not dump — raw transcripts in memory directory are useless for recall; only summarized insights should be persisted
5. Add TTL or rotation for session dump files

Workaround

Users can manually disable dreaming via config:

{
  "plugins": {
    "entries": {
      "memory-core": {
        "config": {
          "dreaming": {
            "enabled": false
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Environment

• OpenClaw 2026.4.15
• macOS 24.5.0 (arm64)
• Model: Qwen3.6-Plus-DogFooding (via IDEALab)
• memory-core plugin with sqlite-vec unavailable