Slow RAILS testing

ruby-talk
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

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

···

On 13 Sep 2007, at 21:15, 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?

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.

···

--
Alex

4

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;

5

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 <warlickt@operissystems.com>:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

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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Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFG6cnYWvapaOIz2YYRAuuvAJ4wwlypxThIaHCkVy7t4V1iDdgEHQCfZ5w+
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=JLqS
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6

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;

Ain't that ENGINE=HEAP?

Gaspard Bucher 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?

···

--
  Phlip
  Test Driven Ajax (on Rails) [Book]
  "Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)"
  assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax

7

HEAP does not support TEXT columns... Too bad.

Gaspard

···

2007/9/14, Gaspard Bucher <gaspard@teti.ch>:

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 <warlickt@operissystems.com>:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> 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;
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFG6cnYWvapaOIz2YYRAuuvAJ4wwlypxThIaHCkVy7t4V1iDdgEHQCfZ5w+
> wYBYFf9cGzqs56/O04qhG9I=
> =JLqS
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>

8

Phlip wrote:

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;

Ain't that ENGINE=HEAP?

Both is valid.

Gaspard Bucher 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.

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 <phlip2005@gmail.com>:

Travis D Warlick Jr wrote:

> ALTER TABLE tablename TYPE=HEAP;

Ain't that ENGINE=HEAP?

Gaspard Bucher 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?

--
  Phlip
  Test Driven Ajax (on Rails) [Book]
  "Test Driven Ajax (on Rails)"
  assert_xpath, assert_javascript, & assert_ajax

10

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!

···

--
  Phlip