Site Up. Costs Down: Optimizing OpenClaw’s 1M Weekly Active Users

ClawHub, born out of the OpenClaw Project as a skill repository for AI agents, rapidly gained over a million weekly users, necessitating significant backend optimizations to manage both scalability and cost. Initially vibe-coded, ClawHub's backend, powered by Convex, faced inefficiencies as it scaled, handling up to 9 terabytes of database traffic per day. However, by refining the application's architecture through strategies like turning reactive subscriptions into one-shot fetches for non-collaborative features, creating digest tables to minimize data reads, and optimizing query patterns with compound indexes, data transfer was reduced dramatically to 600GB daily. These adjustments allowed ClawHub to maintain high performance while reducing bandwidth consumption significantly. Convex's backend platform facilitated these improvements by providing tools for real-time updates and insights into bandwidth usage, enabling continuous optimization without service interruptions.