[Catalyst] Vagrant / Developing with VM / NFS performance

[Tobias Kremer]

I'm playing around with Vagrant[1] to manage my development VMs and
I'm running into some NFS-troubles and just wanted to hear if and how
you guys are developing with a guest OS.

The thing is that Vagrant by default configures the VM to export a
shared directory (where my Catalyst app lives) from the host OS (OS X
in my case) to the guest VM (Debian). I'm using the alternative NFS
mount option because VirtualBox's shared folder support is known to be
super slow. Problem is, Catalyst::Restarter doesn't pick up changes to
my files. I suppose this is due to NFS doing attribute caching. If I
turn this off (with "noac" in the NFS mount options), the Catalyst
server picks up the changes more quickly but it also takes a full
minute to start (as opposed to 3-4 seconds when the files are local).

Having the app locally on my host and exporting it into the VM feels
more natural to me, but the performance issues really make this a
deal-breaker. Does anyone have any advice on how to improve things?
How do you share your files between your VM and your host system?

Thanks a lot!
--Toby


[1] http://vagrantup.com/