如何在Windows上的rails测试中加速ruby？

Question

I've started learning to use Ruby on Rails running on Windows 7, and the time to run tests is painful I'm wondering if I can speed it up. Right now I am using the default test framework (inheriting from ActionController), with a SQLite database and the webrick web server.

While unit and functional tests report a runtime of less than 2 seconds, from the time I run the tests from the command-line to completion is actually 40 secounds.

A friend recommended I use guard. That looks like it will help start the tests as soon as I save, but it seems like the real cost is starting up the webserver or database. I wonder if it might be better to set up apache or mysql and use those locally instead.

Anyhow, what tips do people have for speeding up ruby on rails tests on windows? I tried running the tests on Amazon EC2 linux micro instance (again with webrick and sqlite) and there was significant startup time (though I did not time it).

I tried "rake test --trace". There was a significant pause:

• Immediately before the first line of output
• Between outputing "Execute environment" and "Execute db:abort_if_pending_migrations"

• Between "Execute test:units" and "Run options:"

  The first pause seems worse.

Answer 1

Your best bet is to use spork which now works in Windows. It runs on windows by pre-populating a pool of ready processes (referred to as the “magazine” strategy). The result is that webserver startup time is dramatically reduced.

If running rails on Windows is really the bottleneck then you can run a virtual machine using VirtualBox and run an instance of Ubuntu and work on your rails projects in the VM.