Summary

openclaw onboard takes an extremely long time to complete on Windows, even on a powerful machine. On my setup with 50GB RAM and an i7 CPU, onboarding can take around 10 minutes before it becomes usable.

The slowdown feels abnormal. It looks like there may be blocking operations, repeated retries, inefficient model catalog loading, or loops that slow down the onboarding scripts a lot.

Problem to solve

The onboarding experience is currently very slow and sometimes feels frozen.

The biggest slowdown happens during the model/provider selection flow. After choosing QuickStart, using OpenCode, selecting the OpenCode Zen catalog, and confirming an existing OPENCODE_API_KEY, the onboarding reaches:

◑ Loading available models

At that point it can stay there for a very long time.

The machine does not look like the bottleneck:

CPU: i7
RAM: 50GB
OS: Windows
OpenClaw: 2026.5.12 (f066dd2)

There are also config warnings before onboarding starts, including a plugin packaging warning for openclaw-web-search and stale openclaw-ollama config entries. It is possible that plugin discovery, config validation, provider validation, or model catalog loading is retrying too much or doing repeated work during onboarding.

Proposed solution

Please investigate the onboarding flow for possible slow paths, especially around:

• model catalog loading
• OpenCode Zen catalog browsing
• plugin discovery and validation
• stale plugin entries
• TypeScript plugin packaging warnings
• repeated provider validation calls
• blocking synchronous work during onboarding
• Windows-native specific slow paths
• missing timeouts or retry limits

It would also help if onboarding displayed more detailed progress information, for example which provider or catalog is being loaded, and how long each step takes. Stage timings or debug logs would make it much easier to identify where the time is being spent.

Alternatives considered

The only workaround right now is to wait for several minutes, restart onboarding, or try to clean old plugin/config entries manually. This is not a good experience for onboarding.

Impact

This creates a bad first experience because OpenClaw appears to hang during setup.

Users may think the CLI crashed, the onboarding flow is broken, or the process entered an infinite loop. This is especially painful because it happens during initial setup, before the user can even start using OpenClaw properly.

Evidence/examples

Command:

C:\Users\Zalex\kDrive\DEV>openclaw onboard

Relevant output:

Config warnings:
- plugins.entries.openclaw-web-search: plugin openclaw-web-search: installed plugin package requires compiled runtime output for TypeScript entry index.ts: expected ./dist/index.js, ./dist/index.mjs, ./dist/index.cjs, index.js, index.mjs, index.cjs. This is a plugin packaging issue, not a local config problem; update or reinstall the plugin after the publisher ships compiled JavaScript, or disable/uninstall the plugin until then. TypeScript source fallback is only supported for source checkouts and local development paths.
- plugins.entries.openclaw-ollama: plugin not found: openclaw-ollama (stale config entry ignored; remove it from plugins config)
- plugins.allow: plugin not found: openclaw-ollama (stale config entry ignored; remove it from plugins config)

🦞 OpenClaw 2026.5.12 (f066dd2)

Windows detected - OpenClaw runs great on WSL2!
Native Windows might be trickier.

Setup mode: QuickStart
Existing config detected
Config handling: Review and update
Model/auth provider: OpenCode
OpenCode auth method: OpenCode Zen catalog
Use existing OPENCODE_API_KEY: Yes
Default model: Browse all models

◑ Loading available models

Approximate duration: around 10 minutes to complete onboarding on a machine with 50GB RAM and an i7 CPU.

Additional information

This may be related to Windows native installs, model catalog loading, or plugin/config validation. It would be useful to have visible timing/debug output so users can tell whether OpenClaw is still working or stuck.