Laravel Homestead/Vagrant/Virtualbox is slow on Windows

Question

I have installed Laravel Homestead/Vagrant/Virtualbox on Windows as it said on official site

But it is really slow. Page update takes about

Answer 1

NFS stands for Network File System and you need it for speed.

Laravel homestead tutorial does not say what NFS is and why you need it, which is why I ignored it on the initial install.

1) On your Windows host, install the plugin that adds NFS support to vagrant in Windows.

$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

2) Go to Homestead.yaml, it usually sits in C:\Users\username\Homestead\Homestead.yaml

3) Add type: "nfs" in the folders section like so:

folders:
    - map: ~/code
      to: /home/vagrant/code
      type: "nfs"

4) Run vagrant up --provision

Result:

The speed increases, as in @phazei's answer, from 8 to 2 seconds for each request, but it is much less work. @phazei's answer clarifies some background processes.

I tested it on windows 10 with Oracle Virtualbox-5.2.12, vagrant version-2.1.1.

Please note: Vagrant NFS page says

Windows users: NFS folders do not work on Windows hosts. Vagrant will ignore your request for NFS synced folders on Windows.

But if you have the plugin, you can ignore it.