Slow tests on large rails app

Rails
1

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

I’m using Machinist. How can I speed up my tests? It has really killed
my motivation to test at all…

I’m using rails-test-serve but that only brings the test down to 15
seconds…thanks for any help!

2

jko170 wrote:

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

I’m using Machinist. How can I speed up my tests? It has really killed
my motivation to test at all…

30 seconds? I’ll take that any day! :slight_smile:

I am involved in one project that has a test suite which takes 24
minutes today and is ever expanding. The only option to improve the
speed of that is to do some sort of distributed building. We’re looking
at our options in that area.

Things we’ve done before:

  • Cut down the number of superfluous tests
  • Ensure your fixtures are transactional
  • Switch to Ruby Enterprise Edition or JRuby for faster execution
  • Looked into autotest
  • Buy better hardware
  • Tune the database

–
Roderick van Domburg
http://www.nedforce.com

3

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 1:02 PM, jko170 [email protected] wrote:

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

I’m using Machinist. How can I speed up my tests? It has really killed
my motivation to test at all…

I’m using rails-test-serve but that only brings the test down to 15
seconds…thanks for any help!

Try out the “Single Test” plugin (
http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/single_test )

It allows you run the test of a single test file, or a single test
method, in isolation. This lets you focus on getting your one test or
or test file to work in a rapid-feedback way, and after your code
works and your tests pass, you run the full test suite before
committing to see if you broke anything elsewhere in the code base.

–
Steven H. [email protected]

4

Phlip wrote:

jko170 wrote:

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

Projects should not require so many models. Does your design have any
duplication?

That’s a lot of models, but I wonder if that’s the problem. I’m having
a problem with extremely slow specs on my app – only about 6
ActiveRecord models, but in my case I narrowed it down to the view
specs. I’m trying to use assert_select/have_tag and regexps to check
for the presence of certain content in the output. It works perfectly,
but takes forever. Any suggestions?

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

5

jko170 wrote:

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

Projects should not require so many models. Does your design have any
duplication?

I’m using Machinist. How can I speed up my tests? It has really killed
my motivation to test at all…

Can you still TDD by using rake test:recent?

And how long does rake test:units take?

–
Phlip

6

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:02 PM, jko170 [email protected] wrote:

My app has 64 models and my test are so slow. 30 seconds at least.

30 seconds isn’t bad at all.

I’m using Machinist. How can I speed up my tests? It has really killed
my motivation to test at all…

I’m using rails-test-serve but that only brings the test down to 15
seconds…thanks for any help!

You might try moving your unit tests into memory.

http://www.thoughtbot.com/projects/factory_girl/

–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

7

Greg D. wrote:

30 seconds isn’t bad at all.

True, but you probably wouldn’t want it to be any longer than that if
you’re using autotest or similar.
[…]

You might try moving your unit tests into memory.

http://www.thoughtbot.com/projects/factory_girl/

He already said he was using Machinist, so recommending Factory Girl is
probably not all that relevant, since it basically does the same thing
IIRC.

And was that meant to have anything to do with the suggestion of moving
stuff into memory? If so, what? My understanding is that both
Machinist and Factory Girl typically use the DB.

–
Greg D.
http://destiney.com/

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]

8

The apps I work on at work have 180+ models each. There isn’t
duplication, but just way too many features. :frowning:

What Greg said works pretty well for us - factory_girl or any of the
other factory libraries are great.

You could also mock the AR find/delete/create/update calls if you want
and return objects afterwards. That’s helped me in some side projects.

I wish my test suite would run in 30 seconds though!

9

So far, this is the fastest solution I can find:

Dataset with rails-test-serving

http://github.com/Roman2K/rails-test-serving

I was able to cut down a test file from 15 seconds to 2 seconds using
dataset’s “create_record” method, which bypasses validations.
Factory’s are nice but they make your tests very slow.

10

Hey guys, thanks for all the suggestions! Sorry, I meant 30 seconds
each test file, not the entire suite. Whenever I run ‘rake’, I
always switch over and do something else for awhile because it takes
so long.

Have you guys seen this? http://www.devver.net/

Hopefully this will help a problem which currently the only solution
is running them in parallel.

11

Check out this (my) presentation:

http://bit.ly/grease-your-suite-html

arrow keys navigate.

12

Factory’s are nice but they make your tests very slow.

This has been my experience, too. I attempted to solve it (with some
measure of success) with my factory_data_preloader gem:

You can also benchmark your tests to see where the bottlenecks are:

13

Myron M. wrote:

Factory’s are nice but they make your tests very slow.

This has been my experience, too.

Though not mine as far as I can tell. Which factory library are you
using? I use Machinist.

Best,

Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
[email protected]