EDUCATION & TRAINING
Delta Channels: How We’re Evolving our Runtime for Long-Running Agents
LangChain Blog
About This Tutorial
LangChain has introduced Delta Channels, a new primitive in langgraph 1.2, to improve the runtime for long-running agents. This change reduces checkpoint storage costs by storing only the delta each step, rather than a full snapshot, and writing periodic full snapshots to bound recovery cost. Existing threads continue to work, and the full LangGraph API surface remains unchanged. Delta Channels achieve a 40x reduction in checkpoint storage for a coding agent running 200 turns, from 5.3 GB to 129 MB, with practically no performance drop in state rehydration.