Slow RAILS testing

Ruby
1

My RAILS unit tests take approximately one minute to run. This may
not sound like much, but it’s a real drag on incremental development.
I imagine most of the slowness in spent in applying the database
schema to the test database. Is there a memory-resident database that
would speed up my tests?

2

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kevin cline wrote:

My RAILS unit tests take approximately one minute to run. This may
not sound like much, but it’s a real drag on incremental development.
I imagine most of the slowness in spent in applying the database
schema to the test database. Is there a memory-resident database that
would speed up my tests?

You can use Heap tables with MySQL if you wish. This SQL statement will
convert
a table into a Heap (memory-resident) table:

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;
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3

kevin cline wrote:

My RAILS unit tests take approximately one minute to run. This may
not sound like much, but it’s a real drag on incremental development.
I imagine most of the slowness in spent in applying the database
schema to the test database. Is there a memory-resident database that
would speed up my tests?
I think you can run SQLite in-memory. The Rails people would know more,
though:

http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk

I tend to factor tests so that they don’t use Rails’ built-in fixtures,
though - you really don’t need to test the database interface, so it’s
pure overhead.

4

Hello,

Do all your tests need to access the database? I find this approach
( http://nutrun.com/weblog/rails-fast-test-suite/ ) useful in terms
of instant feedback and application code responsibility boundaries.

Thanks,
George

5

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;

Ain’t that ENGINE=HEAP?

Gaspard B. wrote:

HEAP does not support TEXT columns… Too bad.

Suppose one wrote a rake task db:heap_mode, to switch the test
environment
DB to the faster system. Could that task programmatically access
schema.rb,
find the TEXT columns, and downgrade them to long strings?

6

HEAP does not support TEXT columns… Too bad.

Gaspard
2007/9/14, Gaspard B. [email protected]:

7

I could more then double the speed of my tests by avoiding fixtures
reload on each test and using transactions. Have a look at
http://dev.zenadmin.org/browser/trunk/test/test_helper.rb and
http://dev.zenadmin.org/browser/trunk/test/zena_test.rb.

It sure helped me (and I will now try Travis’ HEAP idea on top of that).

Gaspard

2007/9/14, Travis D Warlick Jr [email protected]:

8

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

One possible rails issue: I believe the entire test database structure is
erased
and recreated everytime, so it couldn’t be a rake task, it would have to
be
integrated into the test task.

Yup; I just got that.

Then I put the conversion into the top of the source file of the first
test
suite in alphabetic order (please nobody comment on the
sustainability!),
and got a huge spew of test faults, as if I had no fixtures. The
converter
was just this:

require File.dirname(FILE) + ‘/…/test_helper’

def setup_database
tables = %w( accessories chats fighter_images props rings rounds users
)
tables.each do |table|
ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute("
ALTER TABLE #{ table } ENGINE=HEAP
")
end
end
setup_database

class AccessoryTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
…

And note, per the memory consumption issues you mentioned, that you
don’t
need to put all the fixtures in the list - if it worked!

9

I tried this, but HEAP does not support transactions either. From what
I see, it feels like it’s going to be much slower to reload the
fixtures then to do a ROLLBACK…

2007/9/15, Phlip [email protected]:

10

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Phlip wrote:

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;

Ain’t that ENGINE=HEAP?

Both is valid.

Gaspard B. wrote:

HEAP does not support TEXT columns… Too bad.

Suppose one wrote a rake task db:heap_mode, to switch the test
environment DB to the faster system. Could that task programmatically
access schema.rb, find the TEXT columns, and downgrade them to long
strings?

One possible rails issue: I believe the entire test database structure
is erased
and recreated everytime, so it couldn’t be a rake task, it would have to
be
integrated into the test task.

A database issue: you would have to beware of your table size. Every
HEAP table
with at least 1 VARCHAR is at least 50KB due to how the VARCHARs are
stored in
memory, and the larger you make your VARCHARs the larger your tables get
(eg. a
table with 1 field of VARCHAR(20000) gives a table size of ~170KB).

If anyone wants to do this, note that the largest record size using the
HEAP
engine is 64KB, and the largest single VARCHAR is ~21000.
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