I find myself typically running 14 active VMs on an 8GB laptop (so 585MB
for the average VM), and would save some startup/shutdown time if I
could run more, so I've started looking around a bit at what's consuming
RAM.

One small answer is qubes-manager, which starts up using 828MB VIRT,
including 71MB RSS, with 30MB SHR. This is exacerbated by the memory
leak described in https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/860.

The attached vm-watch is a non-configurable text-mode program imitating
most of the qubes-manager output. The main missing feature that I care
about is an audio indicator; haven't dug into how qubes-manager does
this yet. There are no control mechanisms such as "Shutdown VM", but I'd
rather do that from the command line anyway.

This uses 330MB VIRT, including 26MB RSS, with 6MB SHR; and it doesn't
seem to have the memory leak. This might be useful in pinning down the
leak in qubes-manager.

---Dan

D. J. Bernstein:
Good idea.  Thanks for the inspiration.  Here's my version.
The usual caveats about bugs and crappy code apply--it's a giant hack.

Andrew