Why is RSpec so slow under Rails? - ruby-on-rails

Whenever I run rspec tests for my Rails application it takes forever and a day of overhead before it actually starts running tests. Why is rspec so slow? Is there a way to speed up Rails' initial load or single out the part of my Rails app I need (e.g. ActiveRecord stuff only) so it doesn't load absolutely everything to run a few tests?

I definitely suggest checking out spork.
http://spork.rubyforge.org/
The railstutorial specifically addresses this, and gives a workaround to get spork running nicely in rails 3.0 (as of this moment, spork is not rails 3 ready out of the box). Of course, if you're not on rails 3.0, then you should be good to go.
The part of the tutorial showing how to get spork running in rails 3.0
http://railstutorial.org/chapters/static-pages#sec:spork
Checking when spork is rails 3.0 ready
http://www.railsplugins.org/plugins/440-spork

You should be able to to speed up your script/spec calls by running script/spec_server in a separate terminal window, then adding the additional -X parameter to your spec calls.

Why is rspec so slow? because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.
Is there a way to speed up Rails' initial load you could try using mocks instead of relying on the database, this is actually correct for unit testing and will definitly speed up your unit tests. Additionnaly using the spec server as mentionned by #Scott Matthewman can help, same with the autotest from zentest mentionned by #Marc-Andre Lafortune
Is there a way to single out the part of my Rails app I need (e.g. ActiveRecord stuff only) so it doesn't load absolutely everything to run a few tests? what about this
rake test:recent
I am not sure how the rspec task integrate with this but you could definitely use the test:recent task as a template to do the same with rspec tests if the.
rake test:rspec:recent
doesn't exist yet

because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.
The real culprit is if you run it using rake spec, it runs the db:test:prepare task.
This task drops your entire test database and re-creates it from scratch. This seems ridiculous to me, but that's what it does (the same thing happens when you run rake:test:units etc).
You can easily work around this using the spec application which rspec installs as part of the rspec gem.
Like this:
cd railsapp
spec spec # run all specs without rebuilding the whole damn database
spec spec/models # run model specs only
cd spec
spec controllers/user* # run specs for controllers that start with user

I think the "zen" experience you're looking for is to run spec_server and autospec in the background, with the result being near-instant tests when you save a file.
However, I'm having problems getting these two programs to communicate.
I found an explanation here:
I've noticed that autotest doesn't send commands to the spec_server.
Instead it reloads the entire Rails environment and your application's
plugins everytime it executes. This causes autotest to run
significantly slower than script server, because when you run the
script/spec command the specs are sent to the spec_server which
already has your Rails environment fired up and ready to go. If you
happen to install a new plugin or something like that, then you'll
have to restart the spec_server.
But, how do we fix this issue? I'm guessing it would involve downloading ZenTest and changing code for the autotest program, but don't have time to try it out right now.

Are you running this over Rails? If so, it's not RSpec's initialization that's slow, it's Rails'. Rails has to initialize the entire codebase and yours before running the specs. Well, it doesn't have to, but it does. RSpec runs pretty fast for me under my small non-rails projects.

Running tests can be really slow because the whole rails environment has to load (try script/console) and only then can all tests run. You should use autotest which keeps the environment loaded and will check which files you edit. When you edit and save a file, only the tests that depend on these will run automatically and quickly.

If you're using a Mac I recommend using Rspactor over autotest as it uses a lot fewer resources for polling changed files than autotest. There is both a full Cocoa version
RSpactor.app
or the gem version that I maintain at Github
sudo gem install pelle-rspactor
While these don't speed up individual rspec tests, they feel much faster as they auto run the affected spec's within a second of you hitting save.

As of rspec-rails-1.2.7, spec_server is deprecated in favor of the spork gem.

The main reason is that require takes forever on windows, for some reason.
Tips for speedup:
spork now works with windows, I believe.
You can try "faster_require" which caches locations:
http://github.com/rdp/faster_require
GL.
-rp

If you are on a Windows environment then there is probably little you can do as Rails seems to startup really slowly under Windows. I had the same experience on Windows and had to move my setup to a Linux VM to make it really zippy (I was also using autotest).

Related

RSpec is caching my source code, I don't want it

I am using RSpec with RoR 4.1, if I run
bundle exec rspec spec/requests/citilink_request_spec.rb
or
bundle exec rspec spec
Then rspec will load the files correctly if it is the first execution, but at the second execution, it'll load the cached file. I can confirm this that the backtrace produced refer to the old point which I swapped with comment. It refers to a comment!
How can I disable this functionality, it shouldn't be de default setting IMHO.
It is not RSpec problem, but Sidekiq. Yah, I am using Sidekiq. And the Sidekiq part not loading again my code whenever it changes. So, I need to reload the Sidekiq and everything works as expected.
I should have mentioned that the code in question is working asynchronously in a worker executed by Sidekiq that is using Redis.

Rspec hangs after it finishes running through my tests

Has anyone seen this problem before? Sometimes when running specs for my Rails 3.2.14 project rspec seems to finish as usual:
Finished in 1.27 seconds
6 examples, 2 failures
Failed examples:
rspec ./spec/models/my_spec.rb:123 # Hello world 1
rspec ./spec/models/my_spec.rb:234 # Hello world 2
but then it just hangs there and won't let me continue working in that shell. I can kill -9 the process from another terminal tab, or just start a new shell and run the tests again there, but it makes test driven development a huge pain.
When I restart my computer, the problem goes away for a while, but it always happens again eventually. After it hangs once, it keeps hanging every time I run rspec, even if I run different tests in a different project. The same tests in the same projects pass just fine on my coworkers' computers every time.
I'm not sure what information would help to answer this question so let me know if there is something I should add to this post. I'm running ruby 2.0.0p195 and rails 3.2.14. I've got Mac OS 10.7.5. I use zsh and rbenv.
Thanks for reading!
I had the same issue and solved it by adding the following to my spec_helper.rb:
SimpleCov.start do
use_merging false
end
Note that I'm running on a virtual box vm with a synched directory.
Here's the explanation I found as to why this works:
"When simplecov exists, by default it will try to merge the recorded coverage with what's on disk. To avoid corruption it uses a lock file to guard this merge. Because my virtual box shared fs is not actually posix compliant, the lock file would never acquire, and silently block forever here.
Since I don't care about merging coverage results, the solution for me was to simply disable this behavior with the use_merging flag."
https://gist.github.com/k-yamada/3930916
Ok, figured it out with a friend's help. All it took was removing SimpleCov from my spec_helper. Not sure why SimpleCov was causing the issue, but I'll post an update here if I find out.

Why is rake running specs and features twice?

For a couple of months now I have the problem that running rake spec cucumber (or each one separately) runs the specs and/or features always twice. It's kind of annoying, since it makes me wait longer.
Now if I run rspec or cucumber then the specs/or features only run a single time.
I'm not sure what details I could provide here, so I'll just link the repo here https://github.com/deiga/new-Roydon/tree/feature/allow-orders-without-registeration

Rspec Still Slow On Windows Even With Spork

I have followed this tutorial on speeding up rspec with spork, and I am on a win7 x64 box with ruby 1.9.2 and rails 3.2.5. Everything is working, but test still execute slowly. Does spork simply not do much on windows because the OS doesn't support forking?
Is there anything else I can do to speed things up?
I also found this similar SO question, and watched the video by Corey Haines on fast testing. I enjoyed the video, but I can't help feeling that something is off when the state of our tools (slow tests due to rails startup time, in this case) dictates how we structure our code. If that slow startup time didn't exist, would there be any need for his methods? On the other hand, with tests taking 10-30 seconds to run, so many of the benefits of TDD are lost that I see his point of view as well.
In case it's relevant, here's the console output from spork as the rspec was executed a couple times:
$ bundle exec spork
Using RSpec
-- Starting to fill pool...
Wait until at least one slave is provided before running tests...
** CTRL+BREAK to stop Spork and kill all ruby slave processes **
Spork is ready and listening on 8989!
-- Rinda Ring Server listening for connections...
-- build slave 1...
Preloading Rails environment
-- build slave 2...
Preloading Rails environment
Loading Spork.prefork block...
Loading Spork.prefork block...
Running tests with args ["--color"]...
--> DRb magazine_slave_service: 1 provided...
--> DRb magazine_slave_service: 2 provided...
<-- take tuple(2); slave.run...
-- (2);run done
Done.
-- build slave 2...
Preloading Rails environment
Loading Spork.prefork block...
Running tests with args ["--color"]...
<-- take tuple(1); slave.run...
-- (1);run done
Done.
-- build slave 1...
Preloading Rails environment
Loading Spork.prefork block...
--> DRb magazine_slave_service: 2 provided...
The Code Shop is building an MRI Ruby optimized for Windows, you can find more about it on their Website or their Github Repo.
I also suggest you to watch this talk about developping rails apps on Windows
Try checking out http://railscasts.com/episodes/413-fast-tests. This shows a lot of different tools that can improve the speed of your test suite significantly!
Before, I was as patient as anybody else in running RSPEC tests using Windows! Doing rake(s) takes too much of my time and it wasn't really healthy anymore. Deliverables were some kind of delayed because the development in Windows was such a pain. And that's the truth. That's why I switched to Linux. But sometimes, there were still trouble(s) in using Linux (hassle installation of some stuffs and more). I just remained patient until I switched to MAC which is a lot better.
If you are really consistent in using Windows for ROR then running tests would be that slow if there are plenty of modules to test.
I'm kinda sure also that Selenium testing would be a disaster in Windows.
But, you may also try to add some other stuffs like using GUARD (for faster execution of test scripts) wherein you don't have to type rspec spec repeatedly.
See: https://github.com/guard/guard
For the spork, well I also encountered a bug about it (before)... wherein I'm testing some spec files using Linux and then it was so slow that I really hated using it.
And that's the reality.
Check out how I configured SPORK to work for rspec:
spec_helper.rb
See: https://github.com/xirukitepe/animelist/blob/master/spec/spec_helper.rb
I would use a linux VM for this kind of thing...
The biggest increase in test speed I've managed to get with RSpec has been to ensure it never hits the database unless it absolutely has to.

Speed up slow unit testing for a rails app on Windows?

I'm looking for the quickest way to run unit tests for a rails app on a Windows machine, preferably automatically. My environment is:
Ruby 1.8.7
Rails 3.0.9
ZenTest 3.6.0 (the latest versions 4.6.2/4.5.0 failed when I tried them for some reason)
Currently they run very slowly, eg. 30s to run a suite of 12 very simple unit tests, time mostly spent starting ruby it seems. The tests themselves take 5s to run according to autotest. For someone used to running 100s of tests in 10s, this is agony, and makes TDD infeasible. I'd even be happy if I could re-run one unit test in less than 5s...
I've searched other questions. Some are old and some conflict. What's the latest accepted wisdom on this? Here are the suggestions I'm aware of:
Use faster_require and/or faster_gem_script (though I had problems getting this working...)
Try JRuby (though that seems as slow starting?)
Upgrade ruby to 1.9.x
spork?
doze?
rails-dev-boost?
Getting a Linux box (or VMware) is out of the question at present, though getting more tempting...
You may want to look at something like spork (and a blog entry).
I write my tests using rspec and I have had great success making my tests run much faster with spork. The reasons tests rails tests run so slowly is because of the amount of time it takes to load rails and all the other gems that you use in your app.
If you can also upgrade to ruby 1.9.2 that would be quite useful.

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