Web development performance inside and outside a VM

Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by knotty66 on Monday July 22, 2013 @04:25PM (#6086238)

Anecdotally, Using NFS with Vagrant / Virtualbox instead of the default Virtualbox shared folder speeds up things drastically. Add the following line in your Vagrantfile to test it out:

config.vm.share_folder "/vagrant", "/vagrant", "./", :nfs => true

Also, tweaking the DNS settings seems to help:

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "off"]

vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnsproxy1", "off"]

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by bdon on Monday July 22, 2013 @04:35PM (#6086303)

Author here. Good point, i'll repeat these measurements with NFS instead and add that to the blog post.

EDIT: Updated the post, NFS erases most of the difference between VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion. Nice!

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by joevandyk on Monday July 22, 2013 @07:44PM (#6087255)

Did you test vmware fusion with shared folder?

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by bdon on Monday July 22, 2013 @07:50PM (#6087282)

Yes, VMWare Fusion was tested using shared folders instead of NFS, which are considerably faster than VirtualBox's.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by joevandyk on Monday July 22, 2013 @10:49PM (#6087914)

Hm, I've seen the opposite. I think others have as well.

http://vagrant.1086180.n5.nabble.com/Shared-folders-slow-usi...

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by bdon on Monday July 22, 2013 @11:41PM (#6088108)

Thanks for the tip, I found that using NFS with Fusion shaved a second or two off app boot time. Updated the post with measurements and the link you suggested.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by runamok on Monday July 22, 2013 @06:20PM (#6086843)

Just an additional data point: NFS does not work when you use vagrant with windows as your host OS. Things like git status when run from within the Ubuntu VM was something like 25 to 50 times slower (IIRC 7 seconds vs. 5 minutes) then when I ran it from git bash in windows.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by rizalp on Tuesday July 30, 2013 @07:33PM (#6130849)

Windows use SMB to share files and folders to the network. We can mount that shares using CIFS. There's already some data posted a huge benefit when using CIFS instead of Virtualbox Shared folder

http://www.wilsolutions.com.br/content/cifs-virtualbox-share...

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by clippit on Monday July 22, 2013 @10:09PM (#6087762)

Actually git status is the most annoying part when I'm using Vagrant with Windows. At last I could only use git in Windows to commit my code.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by martinml on Monday July 22, 2013 @06:37PM (#6086925)

Anybody knows if there is an alternative to NFS, VBox's shared folders and Samba? The first doesn't exist in Windows, and the other two are slow and buggy.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by casey_lang on Monday July 22, 2013 @08:13PM (#6087364)

In my experience, OSX's implementation of NFS is buggy as well. It's not uncommon for my NFS server to simply give up and stop responding to requests from the vm. Trying out Fusion's share has been on my todo list for a while. I'm a little sad to hear its performance is poor. I've also found that processes like Guard which watch files for changes aren't properly notified. Even with these issues, moving all my development to VMs created by Vagrant has been incredibly useful.

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by cstejerean on Monday July 22, 2013 @08:18PM (#6087381)

The performance of Fusion looked pretty good in that comparison. What do you mean its performance is poor?

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Re:Web development performance inside and outside a VM by WestCoastJustin on Monday July 22, 2013 @06:54PM (#6087007)

Doesn't look like it. The Vagrant docs only list the default /vagrant mount and NFS [1].

[1] http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/index.html

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