flouri.sh

Ever wonder why it takes so gosh darn long to run your tests?

In my experience, long test times are due to two reasons: fixture loading and fixture instantiation

If you don't use instantiated fixtures such as @users_one, and instead use users(:one), then you can safely turn off instantiated fixtures, saving you all the time of finding the data. But what about fixture load time? If you use transactional fixtures, the loading only takes place once per test file, which could be 100-150 times in a given project. Without transactional fixtures, they are loaded before every test, clearly a waste of time!

My solution was to develop a plugin which proloads and preinstantiates the fixtures only once (well, 3 times was the best I could get). It takes advantage of transactions to rollback the state of the database between each individual test (don't try this on MySQL with bad storage engines like MyIASM, kids). It usually takes a few seconds, of course, but cut a down "rake test" for a large project of ours from 20 minutes to 90 seconds. Plus, you don't have to remember which fixtures you need for every single test file anymore! Try adding the globalization plugin, for example, and you'll realize you need 2 fixtures on every single page.

In my opinion, there's no reason not to preload all your fixtures once before running tests, but that's up to you to decide.

Plugin Usage

1. Install the plugin
2. Add the following to test/test_helper.rb

   PreloadFixtures.preload!
   PreloadFixtures.instantiate!(Test::Unit::TestCase)
   

3. The "fixtures" function in a test is now overloaded to do nothing. All fixtures in the directory will be loaded once and then the tests will be run.

Download Plugin

From our svn respository

./script/plugin install https://wush.net/svn/public/preload_fixtures

Originally posted on ELC

See ELC's other Rails Plugins