Linked (CSS) and scripts don't update content on my VM with a shared folder document root

Question

I have made a clean install of Apache and PHP on my CentOS6 virtual machine, I have also created a shared folder and use it as my document root.

Everything works perfectly, I can access the website, do all the stuff I want to do and I can edit PHP files on my workstation and they will be immediately up to date when testing in a browser.

However, when editing CSS and JavaScript, files that are "linked" into the website, I run into an odd problem, when doing an uncached reload of the page they don't update the content, they do however update the content-length.

So if I've added anything to a script it will give me the same content, with a higher content-length and attempt to correct this by adding unknown character signs (the square question mark thing).

If I remove something the reverse happens, it recognizes that the content-length is shorter and starts removing things at the end.

This has happened on two clean installs and I've tried to Google for someone with the same problem but the diffuse nature of the problem makes it hard to define.

I've tried all Apache configurations possible for forcing un-cached results all without luck.

The only thing I've found to force it to update is a remount of the shared folder

If you need more information I'm happy to supply it!

Answer 1

While I was beginning to suspect that the problem was not in the cache, any other problems were slightly out of my reach as I've not worked much with virtualbox.

However, a colleague of mine noted that vboxsf "is less than good" (not in quite those words). So when I had something else to go on a search was easier to define and presto!

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1940&p=6680&hilit=shared+folder+apache#p6680

which leads on to this:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/faq/error.html#error.sendfile

Disabling them fixed this problem for me!