GitHub issue #62051, filed 7 hours ago: upgrading from 2026.4.2 to 2026.4.5 causes every worker child process — openclaw, openclaw-cron, openclaw-approvals — to independently register all plugins. On a machine with a dozen or more skills/plugins installed, this multiplies plugin initialization work by the number of workers, saturating CPU and memory at startup.

The issue is a plugin loader regression introduced alongside the Dreaming feature. The root cause: an unstable runtimeSubagentMode cache key causes redundant register() calls. Each worker thinks it needs to re-register plugins that are already registered, leading to the saturation.

Symptoms

Confirm with:

# Watch CPU during gateway start
watch -n 1 "ps aux | grep openclaw | grep -v grep"

# Or check startup time
time openclaw gateway start 2>&1 | tail -5

Fix 1 — Rollback to 2026.4.4 (Cleanest)

npm install -g openclaw@2026.4.4
openclaw gateway restart

This is the same rollback as the CLI breakage bug. If you rolled back earlier this week and then re-upgraded for a specific feature, roll back again until the patch lands.

Fix 2 — Reduce Worker Count (Stay on 4.5)

If you need 4.5 features (Dreaming, video generation), you can limit the damage by reducing the number of worker processes. This reduces the multiplication factor:

# In ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json
"gateway": {
  "workers": 1
}

Default is typically 2–4 workers depending on your CPU. Setting to 1 eliminates the redundant plugin registration from multiple workers, at the cost of reduced parallelism for concurrent requests.

For most personal setups, workers=1 is fine. The multi-worker config provides benefit primarily for setups handling many concurrent agent sessions. A single-user personal assistant rarely needs more than one worker.

Fix 3 — Uninstall Unused Plugins

The more plugins installed, the worse the impact. Now is a good time to audit:

openclaw skills list

# Remove anything you don't actively use
openclaw skills remove [skill-name]

Every removed skill reduces the per-worker registration work. If you installed 20 skills experimentally and only use 5 regularly, removing the other 15 cuts startup saturation by 75%.

When Will the Patch Land?

Issue #62051 was filed 7 hours ago and is confirmed by the team. The prior plugin loader fix in 4.x (issue #61756 — redundant register() calls) was patched within 48 hours of being filed. Expect a 2026.4.6 release within 24–72 hours that addresses both this regression and the earlier CLI breakage bug.

Watch github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases for 4.6.

Summary of 4.5 known issues: CLI breakage on some npm updates, CPU saturation from plugin loading regression, and Dreaming experimental status. If stability matters more than new features, 2026.4.4 remains the recommended version. Upgrade to 4.6 once it drops and the community confirms it's clean.