Alex Hopmann’s Blog

So Windows (like most OSes) maintains a number of caches where it keeps in RAM frequently accessed disk contents (as well as a few other things). Normally these are not adjustable- it just uses extra free memory for this to improve performance, and the minute you actually need the memory, it is freed up and available to a real program.

Hyper-V puts a little twist in this. When you create or start up a new VM, it needs the full memory as hard-allocated memory to that VM and apparently it doesn’t force a cache clear if there isn’t enough memory available. We are building a bunch of stuff on 48GB servers and initially thought we would easily be able to put 3x 15GB VMs on them- the remaining 3GB would be plenty for the OS that basically wasn’t doing anything. But at times we have found the Cached memory is as high as 20GB (after a bunch of big file copies, usually of VHD images), and the machine doesn’t have enough free RAM to boot the target VMs.

Any thoughts on how we can clear this? Dynamic memory coming in future releases should fix this issue, but for now it would be great if we could just run a cache clear/flush right before VM start time.

Last weekend we headed down to Northern California to do Tough Mudder. Six months ago when we signed up for this it sounded like a great idea. As the event day got closer and closer the Tough Mudder guys kept sending email updates about how hard-core this event is. To be honest I was starting to dread it. My overall fitness is ok (I ran the Bellingham half-marathon a couple of weeks ago) but I hadn’t been doing my pushups and was pretty sure climbing over a 12′ wall sounded impossible.

Getting to the event via AlexAir was perfect. Rather than flying into Sacremento which is over 3 hours drive away we flew into Calaveras County airport which was less than an hour from the site. Calaveras (KCPU) is a classic wonderful small airport with friendly FBO with a loaner-truck, nice gas prices, a great runway and all.

We lucked out and event day weather was great. Not too cold, not too hot. We started a bit after noon, shouted our Tough Mudder pledge and started on the course. In the end it wasn’t so bad- going up and down the mountain twice at altitude was exhausting, but the obstacles weren’t as bad as I feared. There tended to be foot holds, the wall wasn’t straight up, an the bus you had to climb over had a net.

Tough Mudder isn’t officially timed. It is more about teamwork and it was sweet to have a great team. Overall a really fun event.

On our way back from a long bike ride (we are kicking off training for the STP this year), Kat and I were looking for a good place to grab some brunch. Seattle Magazine had just done a round-up of best breakfast spots and mentioned brunch at The Corson Building. We have been meaning to go there so it seems like a great idea.

Their format is a bit different from normal- its tiny inside, and its prix-fixe, with a buffet with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff and a choice from two hot entrees. We enjoyed the buffee a lot- a citrus salad with orange, grapefruit and blood-orange, a great beet salad, some radicchio, home-made yogurt with some great jam and nuts to mix in, and a couple of other things. We got both entrees, a quiche with pork belly (bacon!) and sturgeon. Everything was great, and the overall experience was a really nice departure from the standard brunch experience all over town. At $23 its not inexpensive and I’m sure that will deter many people, but for a special experience with top local ingredients, its well worth it.

I’ve been having a problem lately with the Windows Media Center I use for my main TV. I’m still running Media Center on Vista and I have a 750GB drive in the box that only has about 200GB of real content on it, but even though it should have around 500GB free, its only reporting 10-20GB free.

My suspicion is that the Windows Home Server integration might be at fault. I recently upgraded my Home Server with Power Pack 3 and it has a cool new feature that integrates with Media Center and can automatically archive data to the larger disks on the server. The Home Server has always been a bit strange about how much free space it reports- despite ~7TB of real free space, the system disk I have is fairly small and I think that causes it to report only a small amount of free space. Now that the C: drive on my Media Center is doing the same thing it makes me suspect that the Home Server is doing something fancy with the disks and causing this problem.

Anyone have any ideas? The Home Server tie might be a total red herring…