[LRUG] Speeding up Specs and Cukes

Thu Feb 17 12:12:36 PST 2011

Thanks for the pointers Hakan, I'll give it a go.

J.

On 17 February 2011 18:40, Hakan Ensari <hakan.ensari at papercavalier.com>wrote:

>  Scroll down.
>
> --
> Hakan Ensari
> http://hakanensari.com
>
> On Wednesday, 16 February 2011 at 22:41, Joel Chippindale wrote:
>
> I tried out and then ditched spork at the end of 2009. The reasons for
> trying to get it running were the same as yours and the reasons for ditching
> it were the things that it looks like guard is meant to resolve (i.e. I
> found it to easy to end up running tests against stale codei), so I'd be
> very interested if you make any progress with this.
>
> This is similarly my second foray.
>
> This fork that I stumbled upon thanks to a SO post does work. Yay!
>
> https://github.com/irohiroki/guard-spork
>
> Then, to get Cuke running with Spork, Guard, and nested folders, the yaml
> file needs some massage:
>
> https://gist.github.com/822965
>
> The above is not fully functional. I don't remember now what was missing,
> though.
>
> Some more detail and links here:
>
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4958325/how-do-i-ruby-debug-in-a-spec-or-feature-if-i-am-using-guard-and-spork
>
> Overall, it feels guard-spork and so on are a bit of a moving target for
> now, so perhaps it's best to wait a few weeks for changes to settle.
>
> The below are cool tweaks. Unfortunately, I'm on 1.9.2 and all MongoDb and
> Redis so can't apply them verbatim. Thanks for sharing though ;)
>
> In the meantime have two other suggestions that may improve your
> rspec/cucumber test performance
>
> 1. Skip dropping and rebuilding the database between cucumber runs.
>
> Typically in development I run a small set of cucumber tests (by tagging
> them @wip). The rake task 'cucumber:wip' can be used to run these but this
> task depends on ''db:test:prepare' to drop and rebuild the database as part
> of the run.
>
> I have found that our our project roughly half the time spent running
> 'cucumber:wip'  is taken up with this database reset. Since the database
> rarely needs to change (in terms of schema) and our cucumber set up already
> ensures that no data leaks between scenarios, I run a modified version of
> the 'cucumber:wip' task, like the one below, which does not reset the
> database to speed up the tests (giving a performance improvement of roughly
> 50% on smaller numbers of scenarios.
>
>     Cucumber::Rake::Task.new(:wip_fast, 'Run features that are being worked
> on WITHOUT running db:test:prepare') do |t|
>       t.binary = vendored_cucumber_bin
>       t.fork = true # You may get faster startup if you set this to false
>       t.profile = 'wip'
>     end
>
> 2. Tune your ruby garbage collection.
>
> Ruby process may be spending a lot of time in garbage collection when you
> are running your tests. Typically you are CPU bound rather than memory bound
> when running tests and so ideally you would like ruby garbage collection
> less often than perhaps it does out of the box.
>
> I use REE which makes it very easy to tune garbage collection (see
> http://www.rubyenterpriseedition.com/documentation.html#_garbage_collector_performance_tuning)
> and find that the following settings improve the performance of running the
> cucumber scenarios on our project by 25% or more.
>
>   RUBY_HEAP_MIN_SLOTS=1250000
>   RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_INCREMENT=500000
>   RUBY_HEAP_SLOTS_GROWTH_FACTOR=1
>   RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=30000000
>   RUBY_HEAP_FREE_MIN=100000
>
> J.
>
> On 11 February 2011 10:15, Hakan Ensari <hakan.ensari at papercavalier.com>wrote:
>
> I have a question to you all LRUGers.
>
> Being fed up with the excruciatingly slow boot of Rails when running tests,
> I finally got around to setting up Spork and Guard in a project. After
> some fiddling, everything seemed wired up. Or so I thought.
>
> For a starter, I cannot do ruby-debug if I start with `bundle exec guard.` It
> does work if I start spork without guard, but what's the point of spork
> without guard?
>
> Second bummer: Spork doesn't handle nested Cucumber feature folders out of
> the box. The answer to this I suppose is easier and involves some magic
> incantation in the `cucumber.yml` file requiring the feature folder etc.,
> but I was so fed up with #1 that I did not get around figuring out the fix
> for this either.
>
> Anyone with a functional relationship with the above tools care to share
> their story?
>
> The gems involved -
>
>   * rspec (2.5.0)
>   * cucumber (0.10.0)
>   * cucumber-rails (0.4.0.beta.1 f3002fa)
>   * guard (0.3.0)
>   * guard-cucumber (0.2.3)
>   * guard-rspec (0.1.9)
>   * guard-spork (0.1.4)
>   * spork (0.9.0.rc3)
>
> --
> Hakan Ensari
> http://hakanensari.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20110217/7cb5a577/attachment-0003.html>