For years, the primary bottleneck for virtual machine based development environments with Vagrant has been filesystem performance. CPU differences are minimal and barely noticeable, and RAM only becomes an issue when many virtual machines are active[1]. I spent the better part of yesterday benchmarking and analyzing common filesystem mechanisms, and now share those results here with you.
I’ll begin with an analysis of the results, because that is what is most interesting to most people. The exact method of testing, the software used, and the raw data from my results can be found below this analysis.
In every chart shown below, we test reading or writing a file in some way. The total size of the file being written is fixed for each graph. The Y axis is the throughput in KB/s. The X axis is “record size” or the size of the chunks of data that are being read/written at one time, in KB.
