Vagrant troubles

I think I just found a solution for speeding up vagrant significantly on windows machines
(yes, Windows machines):

In your Vagrantfile, add the "nfs: true" at the end of your synced folder config:(just do it)
config.vm.synced_folder 'www', '/var/www', nfs: true

then do:
vagrant plugin install vagrant-winnfsd

and finally:
vagrant reload

Vagrant runs at least 5 times as fast as it used to.

NOTE: make sure you disable sendfile in the NGINX config, so add :
sendfile  off;
inside the http {} tags

If this isn't done, vagrant will cache everything, and never clear the cache. None of your changes will reflect.

NOTE2:
this might help(not my own work, will replace later, ref: http://laravel.io/forum/09-25-2014-caching-in-homestead-with-nfs-despite-sendfile-being-off):

• I was having the same problem and it turned out to be because of 2 things:
  • 1) opcache.revalidate_freq
  • 2) The guest machine's date needed to be behind the host
  To fix it, first find the location of opcache.so:

  $ sudo find / -name 'opcache.so'
  /usr/lib/php5/20131226/opcache.so`
  

  Add that location to opcache.ini and ensure the file has revalidate_freq set to 0 (I use nano, but you can use vim or whatever editor you want):

  $ sudo nano /etc/php5/mods-available/opcache.ini
  
  zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/20131226/opcache.so
  opcache.memory_consumption=128
  opcache.interned_strings_buffer=8
  opcache.max_accelerated_files=4000
  opcache.revalidate_freq=0
  opcache.validate_timestamps=on
  opcache.fast_shutdown=1
  

  And to fix the date issue:
  Update the timezone:

  $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  

  Update the time so it's older than the host OS. For example, if your Host OS is at 11:02:15, then set your VM to:

  $ sudo date --set 11:01:00
  $ sudo service nginx restart
  

  You'll need to reset the date each time you vagrant up the box, but this finally fixed the problems for me.
  Note: Don't forget to update /etc/nginx/nginx.conf to have sendfile off;
  Note: And don't run your dev site on HHVM when developing (use the serve.sh script to turn your site off of HHVM if it was setup that way):

   $ cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
   $ sudo rm your-hhvm-site.app
  
   $ cd /etc/nginx/sites-available
   $ sudo rm your-hhvm-site.app
  
   $ sudo service nginx restart
  
   $ cd /vagrant/scripts
   $ sudo sh serve.sh your-site.app /home/vagrant/whatever/laravel/public 80
   $ sudo service nginx restart
  

  (use serve-hhvm.sh script with the same directions above to turn your site back on to HHVM later if you want)
  Note: Also for local/dev environments, you can update your .env file to cache using array like so:

   APP_ENV=local
   APP_DEBUG=true
   ...
   CACHE_DRIVER=array
   SESSION_DRIVER=array
   ...
  

  In Laravel, you can run php artisan clear-compiled (the opposite of optimize) to clear vendor/compiled.php and other things.