parallel_tests RSpec improve performance

Question

I have a suite of tests for a controller that makes calls to an external sandbox api for testing, which makes the performance rather slow. I'd like to improve performance by allowing parallel_tests to not only run suites in parallel, but individual describes.

For example:

RSpec.describe FooController do
    describe '#index' ...
    describe '#create' ...
end

Because the #index and #create tests do not share any memory space, it's fine to parallelize them. One option is:

RSpec.describe 'FooController#index' do
    describe '#index' ...
end

RSpec.describe 'FooController#index' do
    describe '#create' ...
end

but this makes the tests look awkward and a pain to read through. Is there a way I can easily have parallel_tests run each describe in parallel?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 12 '15 at 02:14

Turns out the maintainer of parallel_tests also has a gem designed just for this: https://github.com/grosser/parallel_split_test

After installing via gem install 'parallel_test_split' you can simply run parallel_split_test

Reduced a slow (but small) suite from 12 seconds to 6

parallel_tests RSpec improve performance

1 Answers1