Ericka Heidi has a new post to her site today continuing on her theme of useful Vagrant advice with a look at optimizing Symfony applications on your Vagrant-managed instances.

A few months after I started playing around with Vagrant and Puppet, with smaller applications, I had the task to create a box for a Symfony app for the first time. I thought “all right, no problema! this will be a piece of cake, I already know the process, I just need to put it on puppet”. And of course I was wrong.

Most of her problem revolved around performance - the Symfony applications were taking between 6 to 8 seconds to load. After trying several options (hardware and software), she narrowed it down to the overall I/O as the application was trying to access an NFS mounted directory for the "vendors" folder. She changed around the locations of some of the directories and was able to drop the page load times by quite a bit. She's posted the results of her work as a Vagrant file for easy download and use too.