Phase 7 / Ep 35: Session In-depth Analysis —— Lifecycle of Dialogue

🎯 Learning Objective: Understand the complete lifecycle of a Session and context window management.

1. What is a Session?

A Session = a complete record of a continuous conversation. From your first message until the end of the conversation, all content is stored within a Session.

2. Session Lifecycle

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Active: User initiates conversation
    Active --> Active: Ongoing conversation
    Active --> Compacting: Context window nearing full
    Compacting --> Active: Compaction complete\nCore info retained
    Active --> Idle: User stops conversation\n(over 30 minutes)
    Idle --> Active: User returns to continue
    Idle --> Archived: Over 24 hours\nAutomatically archived
    Archived --> [*]

3. Context Window Management

LLMs have context window limits (e.g., Claude 200K Token). As the conversation grows longer, the Session automatically triggers Compaction:

graph LR
    A["Original Conversation\n1000 messages\n180K Token"] -->|"Compaction"| B["Retained:\nLast 50 original messages\n+ Historical summary 5K Token\nTotal 55K Token"]

Compaction Strategies

4. Session Storage Format

sessions.json (Index)

[
  {
    "id": "session-abc123",
    "startedAt": "2026-04-06T08:00:00Z",
    "lastMessageAt": "2026-04-06T10:30:00Z",
    "status": "archived",
    "messageCount": 47,
    "summary": "Discussed the architectural design of the OpenClaw tutorial"
  }
]

session-xxx.jsonl (Full Record)

One message per line, JSON Lines format:

{"role":"user","content":"Check the weather for me","timestamp":"2026-04-06T08:00:00Z"}
{"role":"assistant","content":"Beijing is sunny today, 28°C","timestamp":"2026-04-06T08:00:03Z","tools_used":["web-search"]}

5. Management Commands

openclaw sessions list                # List all Sessions
openclaw sessions show <id>           # View details
openclaw sessions clear               # Clear current active Session
openclaw sessions archive <id>        # Manually archive
openclaw sessions compact             # Manually trigger compaction
openclaw sessions export <id> > out.json  # Export

Next Up: Ep 36, Memory System—MEMORY.md and Hierarchical Memory Architecture. How Agents remember things across Sessions.