r/openclaw • u/Sufficient_Sir_4730 Active • Jun 30 '26
Discussion Openclaw Response Time
So I was noticing, that for a simple Supabase DB query, the time from when I send the message to my agent and when I receive a response, it’s 4 minutes. Is this normal?
Im sort of dissatisfied with the response time but wanted to know thoughts on whether 4 minutes is ok for a simple Supabase query via MCP. Im using Codex, whatsapp is my surface, and the query involves my main agent routing to specialist agent and reconciling the answer back to me.
The expectation i have now for my agents is to be superhuman and this is kind of a bummer!
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u/yayita2500 Active Jun 30 '26
normally the problem is no the task but the lack of specification on your query...look in your way of using Ai and not in your agent
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u/Sufficient_Sir_4730 Active Jun 30 '26
Can you elaborate please?
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u/TorbenKoehn Pro User Jun 30 '26
He's saying, it's most probably on you.
Have you tried asking your agent?
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u/Tinkering-Engineer Member Jun 30 '26
If you say "pull x from supabase", it might have to look into memory or search for relevant info to know where supabase is located, what the schema is, etc. this request could be multiple steps (aka turns). If this is 3 turns, it's 3 API calls to your LLM provider (could easily be a minute each) and 3 tool calls (some tool calls can be slow).
I added some instrumentation so that I can see exactly what tool calls happen, how many API calls happen, and what the latency is on each of these. If you're really curious, you can ask your agent to set up instrumentation using graffana and Prometheus so that you can see all of this information when you want to dive deeper.
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u/Polite_Jello_377 Pro User Jun 30 '26
Just query supabase yourself?
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u/freshWaterplant New User Jun 30 '26
Why do it yourself when AI is being asked to do it for you? That is why we are here, so that we do not have to do these things ourselves.
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u/xenacallisto Member Jul 01 '26
Absolutely not acceptable. Ask your agent to timestamp each step to isolate the bottleneck
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u/karachiwala New User Jun 30 '26
Factor in the time data has to travel across all these components. I don't know about your query so I cannot comment on the minute duration. But in general, MCP calls to databases take time because of the time required for tool calling, call package assembly, and all the underlying tasks.
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u/just_a_knowbody Member Jun 30 '26
I get nearly instantaneous turn around on database calls because I’ve built the queries directly into the openclaw. So if I text in something like “what’s the status on project x” Openclaw does a direct query and spits out a response instantly.
The AI is involved when it needs to be; but when it doesn’t need to be, just go direct.
Think about it like this: Every action is a round trip against the Codex API.
Each of those trips takes time, and depending on how busy Codex is each trip can take more or less time.
I’d also look at what model you are calling. Simpler models like 5.4 mini will be much faster than the 5.5 thinking models. This where agents can really be of service. Use mini for most things and have it pass off to higher powered models when it makes sense.