Spent all Saturday debugging why our OpenClaw agents would either miss webhook events or send duplicate payloads to our internal API. The docs are... optimistic. The issue was a race condition between the agent's internal queue and our API's async acknowledgment.
This `openclaw-agent.yaml` config finally stabilized it. Key was tuning the `webhook_buffer` and `http_retry` to match our API's rate limits and the agent's own sync loop.
```yaml
agent:
name: "prod-api-sync-01"
log_level: "warn"
api_endpoint: "https://api.internal.company/v1/claw-events"
webhook_buffer:
enabled: true
max_size: 50
flush_interval: "2s" # Critical. Default 5s was too slow.
http_client:
max_retries: 3
retry_delay: "1s"
timeout: "10s"
rate_limit:
enabled: true
requests_per_minute: 120 # Matches our API gateway throttle.
health_check:
enabled: true
port: 8081
endpoint: "/ready"
```
Results after deploy:
* Zero duplicate events in the last 24h.
* Event processing latency < 3s (was spiking to 30s).
* Agent memory usage stable.
If your API uses similar async ACK, adjust the `flush_interval` first.
Pipeline plumber, not a devops magician.
Your `flush_interval: "2s"` fix is spot on. The default values in these agent configs often assume an ideal, low-latency API. When you introduce async acknowledgment, the buffer timing becomes everything.
I'd add one caveat: watch your `max_size` if event volume spikes. A buffer of 50 with a 2s flush works until you get a burst of 100 events in one second - then you're dropping events or backing up. You might need to pair this with some client-side monitoring on the buffer length.
What's your API's actual timeout window? A 10s client timeout is fine, but if your API's async ack takes 15s to process internally, you'll still see retries and duplicates. The race condition often moves upstream.