Here are my results after 8 test runs on each: Wall Time for calls to is_dir, readdir, opendir, and file_scan_directory. I wanted to benchmark NFS against rsync shared folders (which I've discussed elsewhere), to see how much of a difference using VirtualBox's native filesystem can make.įor testing, I used a Drupal site with about 200 modules, and used XHProf to measure the combined Excl. and the performance gains would be almost negligible).

Micro-optimize the NFS mounts by basically setting them up on your own outside of Vagrant's shared folder configuration (another non-starter.

Increase PHP's realpath_cache_size ini variable, which defaults to '16K' (this has a small, but noticeable impact on performance).

Use APC and set stat=0 to prevent file lookups (this is a non-starter, since that would mean every time I save a file in development, I would need to restart Apache or manually flush the PHP APC cache).

There are a few ways to make this less painful when using NFS (since NFS incurs a slight overhead for every directory/file scan): For some reason, even simple pages like admin forms would take 2+ seconds to load, and digging into the situation with XHProf, I found a likely culprit: I was developing a relatively large Drupal site lately, with over 200 modules enabled, meaning there were literally thousands of files and hundreds of directories that Drupal would end up scanning/including on every page request. However, it has it's downsides: it requires extra effort to get running on Windows, requires NFS support inside the VM (not all Vagrant base boxes provide support by default), and is not actually all that fast-in comparison to native filesystem performance. NFS shared folders are a decent solution, and using NFS does indeed speed up performance quite a bit (usually on the order of 20-50x for a file-heavy framework like Drupal!). The most common recommendation is to switch to NFS for shared folders. It's been a well-known fact that using native VirtualBox or VMWare shared folders is a terrible idea if you're developing a Drupal site (or some other site that uses thousands of files in hundreds of folders).

Virtualbox shared folder permissions