At the insistence of my colleagues (that seem to enjoy the steak posts more than the high-falutin’ technology ones) I decided to visit another NYC steakhouse.

It was raining, I didn’t feel like going further so I went to a place near the office at 2 Penn Plaza (Madison Sq. Garden).

It’s a newer place called the Staghorn on 36th, just west of 8th Ave. Really nice and modern inside, unlike most other NYC steakhouses. Almost totally empty.

The prices are a bit below other joints, probably because the cuts are not quite as colossal.

I opted for a T-bone this time and a house salad. All the cuts had the same price, BTW.

The salad had an excellent vinaigrette with a touch of oregano. I fortified it with a tiny bit of blue cheese.

The steak was truly excellent, dry-aged, with a wonderful nuttiness and caramelization, exhibiting slight undertones of hazelnut.

Not perfect though - had the cut been a bit thicker it would have been juicier, another 4-5 oz wouldn’t be too much to add. Nonetheless, a wonderful piece of beef. In the thicker parts it was amazing in tenderness, texture and flavor.

I finished with a rather good tiramisu that was a touch on the oversoaked side but very tasty.

Recommended. This place shouldn’t be as obscure.

D

I normally don’t do retractions unless proven wrong. So, ignore the text below and read Nick’s comment.

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A warning to those who use Datacore’s Uptempo:

While it works wonderfully as long as the server doesn’t suffer a low memory condition, the memory it reserves for cache will get paged out in low-memory situations.

I found out the hard way (as usual), while running some very demanding VMs (I only have 2GB and not the best laptop, a new machine is forthcoming). The way Uptempo reserves memory is by using a specific process, Dscaddmemory or something like that (I’ve now removed it from my system so I can’t remember the exact name). If you look at Task Manager, that process has as much memory allocated to it as you’ve allocated Uptempo.

When I was running out of RAM, I noticed that the process started shrinking in size, until it was 16MB (out of 280MB). Windows, since it looks like a normal process, decided to page it out in order to reclaim RAM.

Of course, this kinda defeats the purpose. I’d rather page out everything BUT my fancy dedicated cache, the way HP-UX does it if you tell it to (story for another day but HP-UX cache tends to work better if you specify the min and max sizes as the same and not let it auto-allocate).

My real beef with Uptempo is that it didn’t try to reclaim the memory when there most obviously was enough memory for it (after it paged itself out needlessly, I had over 350MB free and plenty in the Windows cache).

It didn’t even try to reclaim the RAM after I quit VMWare and had 1.5GB free.

Obviously, either I’m missing something fundamental or some work needs to be done. Granted, any time you are forced to swap heavily cache won’t help much but they should be at least giving the memory back to the process afterwards.

Supercache never shows up as a process, it grabs the memory when the system boots (it’s one of the first things that happen) and nothing can swap it out. It’s also configurable on-the-fly, Uptempo needs a reboot for any size changes.

With 64-bit all these helper caching programs will probably become obsolete since cache is not limited to 1GB any longer. Though I’m not sure I subscribe to Vista’s Superfetch, since it does make the HD work like crazy when you first start the box and is more suited for boxes that are not shut down it seems. Once it settles down it works OK.

D