It's likely impossible to make volumes shared from the host to the container fast for all use cases. It's also likely impossible to make them work as expected

It's likely impossible to make volumes shared from the host to the container fast for all use cases. It's also likely impossible to make them work as expected on Windows where the host volume is NTFS and the container is Linux. So don't use shared volumes for code. At Convox we offer a Docker development environment in the "convox start" command. We manage syncing code into the container by watching the host file system and periodically doing a "docker cp" to get source changes into the container. It works great and shows the power of the Docker API for taking control of your containers. A bit more info is available here: https://convox.com/guide/reloading/ https://convox.com/guide/reloading/