Local Synchronisation doesn't work for large projects.

When switching from remote to local (default) or vice versa, Local Synchronisation starts, messes up, never stops and stomps on my CPU. Last instance I left it running for 12 hours and it never completed, all the time using ~50% of my CPU. Very little disk or network activity so it must have gotten stuck in a loop. Only fix is to kill NetBeans, clear the cache folder and start over. If I don't clear the cache, it starts Local Sync again and never finishes.

I've now had to disable the copy sources option as it doesn't work reliably. 

What is it trying to do that is going wrong? Why is it doing it?

My setup is:

Project source: on a network share.
Local server: XAMPP with copy of source stored locally in htdocs.
Remote Server: cPanel

All I want is, when working locally for debug, for save to also copy the saved file to the designated local server. But it seems "copy sources" comes with some big overheads that tries to keep my sources and local server copies in sync, but fails with bigger projects.

This also causes other issues. The project config on the local server might be different to the main project source e.g. different database, urls, etc. So we amend config for the local server. But "copy sources" then periodically overwrites the local changes from the sources folder!

Dreamweaver has it right (but no debugging support). There we specify servers; they can be remote or local, doesn't matter. One is designated the test server with the option to auto-copy files on saves to the test server. Neat, simple and no need for the IDE to try to keep track of changes. It just copies on save. When ready, we switch to the remote server (can be staging or live) and upload changes individually or synchronise to upload multiple.

Thus once started, the IDE need do nothing other than whatever we direct it to do. 

I like NetBeans, but in some areas it seems it's trying to be too clever.