Slow IO performance with Vagrant and VirtualBox?

To fix slow IO performance with Vagrant and VirtualBox, start by reading the documentation:
<http: docs-v1.vagrantup.com="" v1="" docs="" host_only_networking.html="">

It’s a long known issue that VirtualBox shared folder performance degrades quickly as the number of files in the shared folder increases. As a project reaches 1000+ files, doing simple things like running unit tests or even just running an app server can be many orders of magnitude slower than on a native filesystem (e.g. from 5 seconds to over 5 minutes).

If you’re seeing this sort of performance drop-off in your shared folders, NFS shared folders can offer a solution. Vagrant will orchestrate the configuration of the NFS server on the host and will mount of the folder on the guest for you.

Example NFS configuration:

Vagrant::Config.run do |config|
  config.vm.share_folder("v-root", "/vagrant", ".", :nfs =&gt; true)
end

After this run:

vagrant reload

On OSX you can check that the folder is mounted properly with:

showmount -e

Or check /etc/exports

On Linux use:

sudo mount

Or check /etc/fstab