Why you should use NFS over VirtualBox with Vagrant

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If you're using Vagrant, you're probably using VirtualBox shared folders feature in order to access your files from inside the VM. The problem is, virtual box shared folders can get preeeety slow. But, the awesome vagrant guys already dealed with that: http://vagrantup.com/docs/nfs.html. The solution is to use NFS.

Here's my "bechmark" comparing using shared folder, native VM filesystem and NFS.


# Host machine: MacBook Pro, 8GB RAM
# Guest Machine: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 750MB RAM


# Putting the Rails app files in the Mac, using VirtuaBox shared folders, 
% time ruby script/runner "User.first"

real	0m19.566s
user	0m1.800s
sys	0m6.744s



# Putting the Rails app files in VirtuaBox (Ubuntu) native filesystem
% time ruby script/runner "User.first"

real	0m2.611s
user	0m2.004s
sys	0m0.620s



# Putting the Rails app files in the Mac, using NFS to access the files from Ubuntu
% time ruby script/runner "User.first"

real	0m8.102s
user	0m1.832s
sys	0m1.440s



# Putting the Rails app files in the Mac, using NFS to access the files from Ubuntu (warm cache)
β [vagrant@lucid32:padrao] (ree-autoseg) 
% time ruby script/runner "User.first"

real	0m2.799s
user	0m2.076s
sys	0m0.640s