I reduced my OpenClaw token usage by 10x
The author successfully reduced their OpenClaw token usage by implementing several optimizations. Initially, they believed that reducing the heartbeat cadence would significantly lower costs, but found that other factors were more impactful. By addressing session compaction and eliminating redundant processes, they decreased their daily token usage from approximately 2.2 million to 256,000.
- ▪The author reduced their OpenClaw token usage by optimizing session management and cron jobs.
- ▪Initial attempts to lower costs by adjusting the heartbeat cadence did not yield significant savings.
- ▪Key changes included implementing a compaction trigger and streamlining cron job processes.
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Reducing OpenClaw token usage May 17, 2026 5-minute read openclaw agents cost infrastructureTL;DR Link to headingI had reduced my OpenClaw heartbeat cadence a few weeks ago expecting a big drop in LLM credit usage. It barely moved the bill. Digging into the per-call usage logs, I found that every persistent session had compactionCount: 0, so each cron run and group chat reply was replaying its own growing transcript on top of a 12k-character bootstrap. The fixes that helped were elsewhere: a 500 KB compaction trigger, deduplicated overlap between the heartbeat and a daily cron, and a reset of the stale sessions. Together they took my daily token total from ~2.2M to ~256k.
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