How do I benchmark the test suite of a Rails 3 application

Question

I want to optimise a test suite. First I need to know where the time is being spent. As a minimun I want to know how much time is spent in each test.

I came across this gem https://github.com/timocratic/test_benchmark but is no longer maintained.

Notice that my goal is to benchmark the test suite, not the application.

Is there any other gem that I could use?

• Rails
• Rspec
• Capybara

Answer 1

Rspec has a minimum functionality profiler included. Have you looked at it? (blog post tutorial for rspec1 but still valid for rspec2)

Basically, if you specify -p then you get a list of the slowest 10 tests.

Answer 2

Are you familiar with the unix time command? If you're just looking to see how long your test suite took to run you can just prepend the time commmand:

time rake spec

After your rspec output you should see something like

Finished in 5.31 seconds
195 examples, 0 failures, 27 pending

real    0m26.580s
user    0m14.085s
sys     0m2.168s

Of course, this is assuming you're on a *nix platform :-)

-a