Remote Project Files - What am I *supposed* to do?
My setup is this: My project and code are hosted remotely from a MacBook over my wifi, on a Samba share that I then pick up on my Windows 11 machine and map to a Z: drive. I can then access the project in PHPStorm from within that mapped drive.
This has worked reasonably well for some time with only sporadic issues, but for the past 5 days PHPStorm seems to be having far more significant issues maintaining a reliable connection. I'm constantly losing files and directories from the project tree, encountering long re-indexing, scanning, etc. Sometimes I have to restart the app for it to even see the project's contents in their entirety.
My SSH connections to the same MacBook remain up when this happens and I've never noticed Windows lose connection to the share, so I'm guessing we're talking very, very brief network interferences that PHPStorm just doesn't have any tolerance for. (and nothing of my network changed 5 days ago so I'm not convinced even that's the issue)
What's the official solve here? I know PHPStorm leans into syncing but I'm dealing with company code that I'm not allowed to store on my personal Windows machine. And I can't be the only PHPStorm user in this boat.
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Thank you for reaching PhpStorm support,
Generally, it is not a recommended setup to PhpStorm with an external file share, since IDE heavily relies on I/O operations, low latency is key to its smooth performance. Because of that, it is not generally recommended to keep your projects on an external file share.
You can find examples and explanations of the various aspects of this limitation in the following tickets:
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-48135
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-2268
With that said, the workarounds are:
• Validate the wifi network's "health":
- Make sure there is no packet loss
- see that the latency is as low as possible(1-3ms)
• Use some Apple USB<->Ethernet adapter to make a reliable wired connection instead of wifi (preferred over the first option)
• use PhpStorm on the laptop which contains the files
I appreciate your understanding.
I've put both computers on wired connections already and it made no difference at all, signaling that this isn't a network problem (or at least not related to connection quality). Its frequency didn't even drop. And this setup worked for months without issue when both computers were on wireless.
I've since found a workaround that's good enough until proper Remote Development across SSH is supported to non-Linux hosts. I'm using the “Code with Me” functionality to, well… code with myself. It has a few limitations that require me to VNC to the Mac for but it's otherwise functional and fully stable.
Thank you for your reply.
> And this setup worked for months without issue when both computers were on wireless
Has something else changed in the OS environment on the Mac? A version of the Samba share, for instance? Or the number of files in the project increased?
Depending on your actual setup, you may want to try installing Samba manually and use it instead of the native one on macOS. There is a chance it will work better (see WI-79100 (https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-79100)).
Code With Me is indeed a good alternative in your case. I'm glad it works for you.
Best regards,