Fix clw-worker-crash: OpenClaw Worker Process Terminates Unexpectedly During Tasks

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:24:49 +0800

1. Symptoms

The clw-worker-crash error in OpenClaw manifests as sudden termination of worker processes handling distributed tasks. OpenClaw is a lightweight framework for scaling task execution across clusters, using clw-worker binaries to process jobs from a central queue.

Typical symptoms include:

Worker processes exit abruptly with non-zero codes (e.g., 139 for SIGSEGV, 137 for OOM).
Log entries in /var/log/clw/worker.log or stdout/stderr:


clw-worker[pid=12345]: INFO: Starting task 'process-data-batch-uuid'
clw-worker[pid=12345]: FATAL: clw-worker-crash detected. Exit code: 139, Signal: 11 (SIGSEGV at 0xdeadbeef)
clw-worker[pid=12345]: CRITICAL: Core dump written to /tmp/clw-core.12345
Supervisor: Respawning worker... (attempt 5/10)

Task queue backlog grows as failed jobs retry.
Metrics dashboard shows high worker churn rate (>50% restart/min).
Systemd or Docker logs report:

docker: Container clw-worker-01 exited (139).
systemd: clw-worker.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=139/n/a

Affected environments: High-load clusters (e.g., >100 tasks/min), Docker/K8s deployments. Crashes often cluster after 10-30min uptime, under memory pressure or specific task types (e.g., image processing).

Fix clw-gpu-oom: Resolve OpenClaw GPU Out-of-Memory Errors

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:24:49 +0800

1. Symptoms

The clw-gpu-oom error in OpenClaw manifests during GPU resource allocation or kernel dispatch, indicating the graphics processing unit (GPU) has exhausted its video RAM (VRAM). OpenClaw, a lightweight C++ wrapper for OpenCL, throws this exception when clw::Buffer creation, clw::Image, or kernel argument binding fails due to insufficient memory.

Typical symptoms include:


[OpenClaw Error] clw-gpu-oom: Failed to allocate GPU buffer of size 2147483648 bytes on device 'NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080' (CL_MEM_READ_WRITE). Error code: -4 (CL_MEM_OBJECT_ALLOCATION_FAILURE)

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'clw::Error'
 what(): clw-gpu-oom at /path/to/openclaw/src/clw_buffer.cpp:145
Aborted (core dumped)

Programs halt abruptly post-compilation, often after successful OpenCL context initialization (clw::Platform, clw::Device, clw::Context). No kernel execution occurs. GPU utilization spikes briefly via tools like nvidia-smi:

Memory-Leak on ErrorVault — Developer Error Code Dictionary

Fix clw-worker-crash: OpenClaw Worker Process Terminates Unexpectedly During Tasks

1. Symptoms

Fix clw-gpu-oom: Resolve OpenClaw GPU Out-of-Memory Errors

1. Symptoms