Rails 2.0 includes optimizations for the loading of fixtures in tests that offer a significant speedup. After updating one of my projects to the latest from svn, my tests are running up to 50% faster than before.
Units:- before: 17s
- after: 12s
- improvement: ~ 30%
- before: 10s
- after: 5s
- improvement: ~ 50%
This particular project has a lot of tests, and to be honest, even 12 seconds is too slow for my tastes. But the improvement sure is welcome. In newer projects, I’m using UnitRecord to test without the database. Obviously, this is much faster. But for fixture-dependent projects, upgrading to Rails 2.0 will yield a significant improvement out of the box.
