Question

I’ve been using ZenTest to run all the tests in my Rails project for years and it’s always been quite nippy. However, on my Mac it has suddenly started taking 3 times as long to run all the tests. We have 1219 tests and for the past year it would run all the tests in around 300 seconds on average. Now though, it’s taking almost 900 seconds:

Finished in 861.3578 seconds.

1219 tests, 8167 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors
==============================================================================

I can’t think of any reason why such a slowdown would occur. I’ve tried updating to the latest gem version, reducing the log output from the tests and regenerating the test database, all to no avail. Can anyone suggest a way to improve the performance?

Answer 1

So I finally solved this. Here’s how in three easy steps:

1. Insert OSX Leopard CD
2. Completely reinstall Leopard from scratch
3. Reinstall Ruby, MySQL etc

After doing this the tests run in under 260 seconds.

I have no idea what happened but it certainly seems to have been a MySQL issue somewhere.