OpenClaw CLI Performance Triage Checklist

Diagnosing Slow OpenClaw CLI Performance

A user on r/openclaw has shared a practical checklist for triaging painfully slow OpenClaw CLI commands. The post outlines specific steps to isolate the bottleneck when commands take minutes to execute.

Key Triage Steps

The checklist consists of six concrete actions:

• 1) Measure where time is spent: Run time openclaw status and then openclaw gateway status to compare CLI startup latency versus gateway response latency.
• 2) Watch host pressure while running a command: Use top or htop to check for CPU steal and saturation. Run iostat -x 1 to check for SSD wait (high await indicates a storage bottleneck). Use free -h to check for swap pressure.
• 3) Validate gateway logs first: Look for repeated model/provider retries, plugin initialization loops, or DNS timeouts. A noisy integration can make every CLI call feel slow.
• 4) Check virtualization overhead: On Proxmox VMs, verify the CPU type is set to 'host' and the disk cache mode is sane. If using networked storage, test a local SSD path for the gateway data directory.
• 5) Isolate config complexity: Start from a minimal configuration (no extra channels/plugins), then add back one integration at a time. If one add-on spikes CPU usage, you've found the culprit.
• 6) Quick sanity on model/provider path: Slow remote provider authentication or health checks can block command paths. Test with one known-fast provider/profile temporarily.

The user concludes by offering to share a benchmark script to compare a bare gateway versus a full configuration on the same machine.