Clock Blog

Virtualbox 4.0.4 Shared Folder Update

Posted on Sunday, 20 February 2011 @ 11:29 GMT in tech-blogs by Paul Serby

Continuing from previous blog post, I have benchmarked the newest release of Virtualbox 4.0.4 with Shared Folder access. Same test as before, benchmarking static content servered up by apache from a Shared Folder using the follow command:

$ ab -c 10 -n 500 http://localhost/resource/image/sprite.png
Unfortunately as before I only got sub 200 request per second.

NFS is quicker than Samba

Since my last post I have switched from using Samba to share my  host system folders to using NFS. When I run the same benchmark I get 1,189 requests per second! That's nearly 3 times faster than Samba and 6 times faster than Shared Folders. I'm currently using MacOsX as my main desktop environment  so setting up NFS was easy:

Step 1 - Define what to share over NFS

This is defined in /etc/exports. I wanted to export my /var/application folder which is actually /private/var/application. Here is the contents of my /etc/exports 
/private/var/application -alldirs -mapall=501:501
To edit your /etc/exports open Terminal from Spotlight and edit with root permission: 
$ sudo vim /etc/exports
Note that I've added -map-all=501:501 this is UID of my user on my Mac, this ensures that files I create on the Ubuntu guest can be accessed by the host system. You can find the UID of you Mac user in Terminal: 
$ id

Step 2 - Reload the NFSD config

$ sudo nfsd update

Step 3 - Install NFS client on guest Ubuntu machine

If you haven't got nfs support you can install it via apt-get 
$ sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Step 4 - Mount Host Folder via NFS

We mount the host folder in the same location on the guest system i.e. /var/application so we add the following line to /etc/fstab 
192.168.56.1:/private/var/application   /var/application   nfs    _netdev,auto 0	0
The IP address is the address of the host from the host only adaptor. If all went well you should now have your host /var/application folder mount on your guest system. If you run mount you'll see it: 
$ mount
192.168.56.1:/private/var/application on /var/application type nfs (rw,addr=192.168.56.1)

Next Step

The next step is to secure your network share so that only your guest can mount it. I've not got round to this yet, if  you have please comment. These may help you: 
man nfsd
man exports

NFS Manager is a good paid for GUI app that creates your /etc/exports for you.

So it looks like until Virtualbox fix the bug that is causing Shared Folders poor performance we have no choice but to use NFS to access files on both the host and guest.

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