performance issues - ⚠ Large CLAUDE.md will impact performance (45.4k chars > 40.0k)

[tbowman01]

I received this warning... Has anyone else?
⚠ Large CLAUDE.md will impact performance (45.4k chars > 40.0k) • /memory to edit

[rberlich]

I see the same. Does not seem to have any negative impact, though.

[ArneNostitz]

maybe just using up a lot of tokens though ...? no? ill ask claude to make it smaller like someone mentioned :)

[roman-rr]

Yes — and ruflo makes this significantly worse.

The 45.4k chars CLAUDE.md warning is from Claude Code itself. But ruflo adds massive additional context on top of that:

Source	Size
Your CLAUDE.md	45.4k chars
300+ MCP tool definitions	~5,000-10,000 tokens
[INTELLIGENCE] patterns per message	~150-200 tokens
Router output per message	~100-150 tokens
91 agent type definitions	~2,000-3,000 tokens

The ruflo hooks also process large state files at session start: auto-memory-store.json (5.9 MB, 5,706 entries — mostly duplicates), graph-state.json (100 MB), ranked-context.json (8.7 MB).

Quick fixes:

1. Trim your CLAUDE.md to under 40k chars (Claude Code's recommendation)
2. Disable ruflo's route and intelligence hooks in your Claude settings to stop per-message noise
3. If you only use ruflo for memory/HNSW, consider replacing it with a minimal MCP server — eliminates the 290 unused tool definitions from context

Full analysis of ruflo's token overhead: Independent Audit