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If an agent fires up NPM, takes a boatload of memory, is that memory released back to the OS after NPM shuts down in the VM?

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In principle yes, in practice it's complicated, using something called "balloon drivers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_ballooning

There’s also memory hotplugging via virtio-mem. But generally speaking downscaling live vm memory can’t be said to be a solved problem, it’s more of an active area of research.

> If an agent fires up NPM... :D :D

I think this is one of the big issues with today's MCP servers. Most are based on Node.js and take a lot more memory than they should, compared to the complexity that the job requires. Just run a few MCP servers locally, and all your RAM is gone...

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