A presentation at Helvetic Ruby in in Bern, Switzerland by Vladimir Dementyev
Tests occupy a significant amount of developers’ time. We write them, run locally, and wait for CI builds to complete—the latter can last from a cup of coffee to a good day nap. And unfortunately, such “naps” are pretty common in the Ruby and Rails world.
Luckily, the reasons for slow tests vary greatly between codebases: misconfigured environment, test-unfriendly dependencies, and, of course, factories and database interactions in general. I like to demonstrate the tools and techniques to help you identify bottlenecks in test suites to help you stay awake.
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
A next-gen Ruby sampling profiler
An interactive flamegraph visualizer
for free. You
can too.