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I use a VirtualBox machine with Arch Linux as development web server. I want to improve rsync transfer speed via smb://. What kind of configuration is best to improve file transfer/synchronization?

Which network configuration is best for speed between the host and the guest?

My config: Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (Adaptador em ponte (bridged), en1: Wi-Fi (AirPort))

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If I understand this right: You are running VirtualBox on an OS X host and mounting Arch Linux drives from OS X via Samba, correct? – patrix♦ Jul 8 '12 at 21:45
Yes. A script mounts the samba share and runs rsync after. – tenshimsm Jul 8 '12 at 21:47
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Have you considered using VirtualBox's shared folder support instead? – Gerry Jul 8 '12 at 22:29
I haven't thought about that. – tenshimsm Jul 8 '12 at 22:49
I seems that I would lose my portability using shared folders. Meaning if I copy the virtual machine to my notebook it wouldn't work because the files are not stored inside the vm. – tenshimsm Jul 8 '12 at 23:07

2 Answers

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This is not directly the answer you are looking for, but an alternative approach that works wonders for my development environments.

Vagrant (vagrantup.com) is a tool built on VirtualBox which facilitates using virtual machines for development environments. Once you installed it, you can navigate to a local folder with your source files in the terminal, and initialize your virtual machine. Vagrant will map the current folder by default to "/vagrant" inside the virtual machine with read-write access, through VirtualBox's shared folder support. You could then point the webroot inside your virtual machine to a folder below there, for example.

Have a look at the Get Started guide for more info on Vagrant. If you prefer Arch Linux, you can also find prebuilt boxes at www.vagrantbox.es. You can even build your own box from scratch, in which case you might want to look at this chapter in the manual.

As for portability, I believe it is not such a good idea to distribute your sources inside a virtual machine this way (even for a single developer). You should put those in a version control system like Git or SVN, and have a check-out on every machine where you want to develop on.

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Thanks! I'll take a look at that. – tenshimsm Jul 9 '12 at 15:12
Looks promissing mainly because it has the name of the only RPG that I played (liked). :) – tenshimsm Jul 9 '12 at 15:22
Note the default folder sharing is not very fast, but Vagrant has an option to use NFS instead. See the Vagrant wiki for info on this. – Andrew Vit Aug 2 '12 at 21:51
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If you're running into an I/O bottleneck, I would recommend putting the VM on it's own hard drive. Either that or upgrade to an SSD for improved disk I/O performance.

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