#19483: feat: enhance rate-limiting with provider-specific backoff and OpenRouter prompt caching
agents
size: L
Cluster:
Model Management Enhancements
This PR introduces two significant improvements to OpenClaw's provider handling, motivated by high-load production scenarios (TrueNAS middleware benchmarking/vSinister orchestrator).
### 1. **Provider-Specific Retry Logic**
Optimized backoff and retry strategies for Anthropic and OpenRouter.
- **Cloudflare Protection:** Detects 1020 'Access Denied' blocks and applies a mandatory 60s minimum backoff.
- **Provider Heuristics:** Properly parses `retry_after` from Anthropic and OpenRouter payloads.
### 2. **OpenRouter Prompt Caching**
Automatic injection of `cache_control` headers for supported models (Gemini, Claude) via OpenRouter.
- **Efficiency Gains:** Verified locally to achieve **100% cache efficiency** in long-running agent sessions.
- **Cost/Latency Reduction:** Reduces processing overhead by caching system prompts and 90% of user history.
### Production Success Story
Prior to these changes, heavy context 'churning' (vSinister project) resulted in frequent 429 Rate Limit cooldowns and 'API noise.' **After applying these patches, we achieved a 100% cache hit rate on Gemini-3-Flash, eliminating rate-limit failures even under deep context load.**
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