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Now, it would be nice if we could see what's in the cache in Windows, but you can't.

If you're really curious, you can download windbg and run !memusage from a local kernel debugging session (or using livekd). You can also use meminfo -a -f, though you'll probably need to post process the output to group used pages per file like !memusage does.

It would nice if you could peg a file to the cache, in Windows, but you can't.

Not that I would recommend that, but you can write a small app that maps a file into memory and VirtualLock's the entire view. That will make sure the file's pages remain resident.

Now you might think that after a day of builds and recompiles, at least some of that stuff would wind up in cache, but it feels like it doesn't.

It's also possible that something else makes things slow. You could profile the build process using xperf, or at least check whether these files are actually being read from disk using resmon.exe or some other disk tracing tool.

Even if it turns out that the files are in fact not cached, it's not usually the operating system's fault. Something must have pushed the cached pages out of memory. For example, maybe Visual Studio itself (or the tools it spawns, like the linker) temporarily consumes a lot of memory during the build, eating into the cache. (Though in that particular case, Superfetch should eventually reload the files back into memory)

A bit of a shameless plug, but if you'd like more information on these "shims", I've started a series of articles on the technology (still hoping to complete it shortly) on my blog at http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=39. FYI, there's over 8000 of them in Windows today, and each time you launch an app, these checks are made.

Again!

This is some interoperability play most likely to placate some government entity without actually doing much. It is the equivalent of the skin of an onion.

This is also temporary as Microsoft has already made well known their intentions to move to signed drivers only. After signed drivers comes signed applications. What good will any of this do if you can't run the app without microsoft's blessing?

FYI: http://www.alex-ionescu.com/?p=24 (related topic and safe for work)

From the about page it says:

He [Alex] is currently studying at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada"

So does the DMCA apply?