Turbocharge Your Ruby Testing with Parallel Specs
In Make Your Test Suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST! (called "the best blog post ever written" by one commenter) Jason Morrison of Thoughtbot demonstrates how to use Michael Grosser's Parallel Specs project to speed up your Ruby tests.
Parallel Specs provides a set of Rake tasks to run specs and tests in parallel, therefore using multiple CPUs (or cores) to multiply your testing power. It does not yet work with Cucumber features but Jason recommends testjour for that purpose - which is designed to work across multiple machines so isn't quite the same thing.
Thoughtbot has found Parallel Specs typically provides a 30-40% speedup for their projects out of the box, so if you're doing a lot of testing (and the best developers seem to say you should be) check it out for some instant satisfaction.
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July 29, 2009 at 6:41 am
Bulllllllllllllllshit.
The best developers don't need to test.
You test when you hire B level drone-workers under you.
KNOW THE SOFTWARE. KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!
Testing is not an excuse for under-paid, under-trained workers.
July 29, 2009 at 7:32 am
There's also DeepTest: http://github.com/qxjit/deep-test/tree/master
It works with test/unit and RSpec. In addition to running tests in parallel to take advantage of multiple cores, it can run tests distributed to multiple computers.
July 29, 2009 at 9:55 am
@Hampton Catlin: Never heard something of TDD and BDD ?! Thats the hot shit now..
no but really,my opinion is that testing should to help developing,cucumber for instance is great to integrate the user while development..but I also don't overestimate it and don't see it as the holy grail of all
July 29, 2009 at 12:22 pm
It looks like it's only good (out-of-the-box, at least) for Rails projects. Am I wrong?
July 29, 2009 at 12:31 pm
@Hampton : you're right, good developpers don't ever use eXtreme Programming. They use Bugless Programming. Why add bugs in your software when it will cost so much time afterwards ?!
July 29, 2009 at 6:26 pm
@Hampton:You are bullshit.
Do you ever work for a customer? I doubt that.
Can you imagine that requesites change while development? If that happens you can not simply change or add a feature without automated tests..sure if you're doing simple apps for you family and friends to show how smart you are then you don't need any technics to avoid mistakes.
But if you have a business then it's interesting how you can handle systems with uncountable LOC without changing behaviour at the other end.
But forgive me _I_ forgot that you know your software..right. You are the only one who will ever read your code..sure.
It's written in stone,that have to be the ultimate truth and will never ever change..sure,sure.
You are that bitch who's putting the shit together and I'am that guy who have to fix it because it never runs like it should.
You use global flags and call it a switch-framework. You are the bitch who I have to convience to use classes,use attributes and not create temporary variables,or to use inheritance to avoid unnecassary control structures.
Sit down and study your odds instead of generalizing everything what you don't understand, kido !
August 9, 2009 at 10:44 pm
I'm I right in thinking this is heart of the parallel processing?
def execute_command(cmd)
f = open("|#{cmd}")
all = ''
while out = f.gets(".")#split by '.' because every test is a '.'
all+=out
print out
STDOUT.flush
end
all
end
I'd love for someone to explain how this works.
August 9, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Ah, I see. The heart of the code is actually this:
pids = []
read, write = IO.pipe
groups.each_with_index do |files, process_number|
pids << Process.fork do
write.puts ParallelTests.run_tests(files, process_number)
end
end
Hmm... will that work for Windows?
August 14, 2009 at 2:38 pm
also check out spork for lightning fast spec_server
http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS316US316&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=ruby+spork