Now I'm wondering if polling should be disabled by default. I've never had a need for it.

@JeffreyWay

Sorry if this is completely stupid, but is the polling not required if someone is using a virtual machine (like homestead) otherwise file changes can't be picked up?

JeffreyWay/laravel-elixir-webpack-official#15

Or is this a completely different issue?

I'm not sure. Seems like some folks on VMs have no problem at all, while others do. It's tricky. Either way, this PR will let anyone turn it off or on... it's just a matter of what we default to.

I've heard reports of polling sending CPUs to 100%.

Or maybe there's a way to set it dynamically. Not sure how to detect that though.

Tough issue. Nobody wants CPU going through the roof, but polling is the silver bullet that works everywhere regardless of filesystem event support, slow VFS mounts in VirtualBox, etc.

Sure. I've no problems with it being a config option naturally, that seems very useful.

Just for a recap (as I'm sure your head must spin trying to remember details of dozens of issues) - The reports of CPU's going to 100 was from here: https://github.com/laravel/elixir/issues/586

And the best explanation of why it doesn't work in VMs (although why only some VMs does seem to be strange) comes from this short article which explains it very well.

http://andrewhfarmer.com/webpack-watch-in-vagrant-docker/

(Thanks for work you do with this package though. Left to my own devices I'd never get round to getting gulp/webpack to work properly.)

Thanks for the recap. Definitely helps.

I'm going to merge this. Thanks for the PR @jeffturcotte!

Quick question on that note, what does usePolling param do?

@landish it changes how files are watched; see the first option underneath the "Performance" section: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar#performance