Look into NFS alternative to speed up Drupal with many files

[klaasvw]

Example (tested via xhprof):

Cache clear on Drupal site with 110 modules; gems and npm modules in theme dir.

• NFS: 200 - 300s, is_dir and opendir PHP function combine 80% of load time.
• rsync: 5 - 10s

Already tested:

• vagrant-unison: plugin has bugs but even with fixed bugs ssh2 can't handle large amount of files
• rsync: only allows sync from host to box. All changes on box are overridden automatically, preventing running grunt or drush on the box and not allowing drupal to generate files (e.g. file fields, image styles, etc.)
• rsync without --delete option: box becomes stale, changing branches results in error because old files persist

Possible solutions:

• vhost on box is served from filesystem
• separate NFS mount for editing files on the host
• internal sync on box between NFS mount and vhost. Note that lsyncd or inosync is a possible here but we might run into similar issues because it doesn't support bidirectional sync.

[klaasvw]

Other possibility is the remote development functionality of Nuclide:

http://nuclide.io/docs/remote/