Memory-Management on ErrorVault — Developer Error Code Dictionary

Fix clw-llm-oom: OpenClaw LLM Context Overflow Error

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 07:56:04 +0800

1. Symptoms

The clw-llm-oom error manifests when OpenClaw attempts to process large volumes of CloudWatch log data through its LLM integration pipeline. When this error occurs, users typically observe the following indicators:

Shell Output:

[ERROR] OpenClaw LLM processing failed: clw-llm-oom
[ERROR] Context window exhausted. The log batch exceeds the model's maximum token limit.
[ERROR] Attempted to process 47,832 tokens against a 8,192 token context window.

Behavioral Symptoms:

The CLI command terminates immediately after initiating LLM analysis
Processing jobs fail consistently regardless of retry attempts
The error appears even when processing logs that previously succeeded
Memory usage on the host system spikes before the error occurs
The error message includes token count statistics showing the excess

Additional Console Messages:

Fix clw-gpu-oom: GPU Out-of-Memory Error in OpenClaw

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:44:04 +0800

1. Symptoms

The clw-gpu-oom error manifests when the GPU memory allocator within OpenClaw exhausts available VRAM during computation or model loading. This error typically surfaces during intensive operations such as training large neural networks, running inference on complex models, or processing high-resolution datasets that exceed the available GPU memory budget.

When this error occurs, you will observe console output similar to the following:

[OpenClaw] ERROR: clw-gpu-oom - GPU memory allocation failed
[OpenClaw] DETAILS: Requested 2147483648 bytes, available: 536870912 bytes
[OpenClaw] CONTEXT: Model 'ResNet152' loading at stage 'weights_initialization'
[OpenClaw] CUDA ERROR: out of memory

The error code clw-gpu-oom is accompanied by diagnostic information showing the exact memory request size, the remaining available memory at the time of failure, and the specific OpenClaw operation that triggered the exhaustion. In interactive sessions, you may notice the training loop freezing before the error is printed, particularly when the GPU is continuously allocating memory without proper cleanup. Applications may become unresponsive or terminate abruptly when this error is encountered, especially if error handling is not properly implemented in your codebase.

Fix clw-memory-not-found: Memory Block Not Found in OpenClaw

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:08:04 +0800

1. Symptoms

When the `clw-memory-not-found` error occurs, the OpenClaw runtime halts execution and throws an exception that typically looks like this:

[ERROR] clw-memory-not-found: Failed to locate memory block at address 0x7f3a2b1c0040 at function: clw_buffer_read at module: libopenclaw.so.2.1.0 call stack: -> read_buffer_impl (buffer.c:234) -> parse_frame (parser.c:89) -> main (app.c:45)


Common symptoms that precede or accompany this error include:

- **Sudden program crash** with no previous warning signs
- **Inconsistent state** where some operations succeed while others fail
- **Garbage or null values** being returned from previously working functions
- **Valgrind or sanitizers reporting** "Invalid read of size X" errors before the crash
- **Double-free corruption** errors appearing in logs

Developers often report that the error occurs during normal operations even though no explicit memory management calls were made in their own code, suggesting the issue originates from library internals or threading race conditions.

## 2. Root Cause

The `clw-memory-not-found` error indicates that OpenClaw attempted to dereference a memory pointer that no longer references valid, allocated memory. This typically happens for one of the following reasons:

**1. Premature Memory Deallocation**

The most frequent cause is a memory block being freed or returned to the pool before OpenClaw finished using it. This creates a "dangling pointer" scenario where the pointer still exists in the code but the underlying memory has been reclaimed.

**2. Stack-Scoped Memory Pass-by-Value**

When a developer passes a stack-allocated buffer to an OpenClaw function, the memory becomes invalid once the function scope exits. OpenClaw may hold a reference to this memory and attempt to access it later, triggering the error.

```c
void process_data() {
    char local_buffer[256];
    clw_buffer_init(&local_buffer, 256);  // Copies pointer to internal state
    
    // local_buffer goes out of scope here
}  // clw-memory-not-found occurs when internal cleanup tries to access local_buffer

3. Double-Free or Double-Deletion

Memory-Management on ErrorVault — Developer Error Code Dictionary

Fix clw-llm-oom: OpenClaw LLM Context Overflow Error

1. Symptoms

Fix clw-gpu-oom: GPU Out-of-Memory Error in OpenClaw

1. Symptoms

Fix clw-memory-not-found: Memory Block Not Found in OpenClaw

1. Symptoms

When the clw-memory-not-found error occurs, the OpenClaw runtime halts execution and throws an exception that typically looks like this:

When the `clw-memory-not-found` error occurs, the OpenClaw runtime halts execution and throws an exception that typically looks like this: