[vagrant-up] ANy idea on how to fix very slow IO performance with shared folders in when using vagrant?

[Chris Adams]

Hi there,

Is anyone else experiencing some pretty dramatic performance issues
with vagrant and virtualbox when using shared folders?

I'm writing because I'm finding it unusably slow on the more recent
builds of virtualbox - (as in 5 second rake tasks taking 40 odd
seconds to run, and a 4 second spin up process for a passenger rails
app on my macbook taking more than two minutes to serve from the VM.

I think this is more likely to be a virtualbox issue than a vagrant
one after looking at tickets like the one below on the virtual box
website, and I don't remember experiencing these issues when I first
started using vagrant about a month and a half ago.

http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1728

If anyone else had any issues like this, and knows of a solution, or
if you know a known good version of Virtualbox to use, I'd love to
hear from you, because it's me and a colleague have been scratching
our heads trying to find workarounds for a good few days now, and we
don't want to give up on it if we can help it.

For what it's worth, we're using CentOS 5.4as our virtual machine OS,
and macbook pros with Snow Leopard as our host machines, running
vagrant 0.3.2 and virtualbox 3.1.6, and we're mainly developing Ruby
on Rails apps, using Apache with ruby enterprise and passenger.

Thanks!

Chris

[Lincoln Stoll]

I'm using VirtualBox 3.1.6 on 10.6 as well, and seeing no issues.

Are you using up-to-date additions in the VM?

Linc.

[Chris Adams]

As in, have I built a new VM using the newest additions?

I think so, but I'd rather check to be sure - where in the VM, or the
accompanying xml file should I be looking for this, and also, what
resources are you allocating to the VM?

Earlier, in IRC I spoke to another developer who told me he managed to
deal with performance issues by whacking the CPU and RAM up, so his VM
was using 2gb of ram, and 2 CPU's.

Thanks,

C

[John Bender]

Chris,

I've had similar problems myself, though only in rare cases. Upon further inspection its a known but unaddressed issue with the guest additions file system (at least it was when last I looked). One my next goals, once I get out from under work, is to find an alternate route in the case where said filesystem is the cause of the issue (nfs or some such).

As for now try updating your version of virtualbox and updating the guest additions inside the base box you are using.

Best

john

[Chris Adams]

Hi John,

Thanks for the heads up on the virtual box guest additions trick.

At work a colleague of mine has written a few rake tasks to hook
kicker (an rub app that triggers commands on file system events on the
host box) to rsync any change in the relevant changes across to the
guest VM.

If it works, I think we should be able to extract it out to add to the project.

Once I've built the latest VM's with the latest guest additions I'll
try again to see if this problem persists ( I think I built the first
CentOS boxes on Virtual Box 3.14, just before we migrated to 3.16...).





--
Chris Adams
mob: 07974 368 229
tel: 0207 558 8971
skype: chris.d.adams
twitter: mrchrisadams