For some reason, some of my files have a last modified date in the future. In addition to this, file operations in PHP are SUPER slow. For example, rebuilding the Symfony2 cache can take over 40 seconds (its takes 1-2 on my MacBook Pro). Notice the time for ListingsCRUDController.php. It just says "2012". In order see the date more clearly I ran ls --time-style="full-iso" -l For some reason it shows that this file's last modified date is ~5 hours into the future. System time: To make things more confusing, the system will intermittently speed up. Suddenly, my app will start serving requests in 1-2 seconds (down from 40 seconds) for no apparent reason. I mean I don't do anything to my code/system config - it just changes. Also, during a slow PHP request, the php5-fpm process (nginx) uses 100% of the CPU for the duration of the request. This is the second VM this has happened on and I need to know why its doing this. It has become unusable. Information About My Setup VirtualBox 4.2.0 Host: Macbook Pro Guest: Ubuntu Server 12.04 Package dkms is installed Timezones match for Ubuntu and PHP. Things I've Tried Both Apache and Nginx. APC enabled and disabled. Xdebug enabled and disabled. 1 processor up to 4 processors. 1gb memory up to 4gb memory. I've installed Ubuntu using the regular kernel and the VM kernel.