How can I speed up the creation of 5,000 records for my rspec tests?

Question

I am using Ruby on Rails 3.2.2, FactoryGirl 3.1.0, FactoryGirlRails 3.1.0, Rspec 2.9.0 and RspecRails 2.9.0. In order to test my application I have to create a lot of records (about 5000) in the database, but that operation is very slow (it takes more than 10 minutes to create records). I proceed like this:

before(:each) do
  5000.times do
    FactoryGirl.create(:article,)
  end
end

How can I improve my spec code so to go faster?

Note: Maybe the slowness is given by (5) article callbacks that run before and after each article creation process, but I can skip those (since the only things I have to test are articles and not associated models) if those slow creation of records... is it possible to make that and is it the right way to proceed?

Answer 1

When you start processing large number of records like that, it's better to do it in sql directly to avoid the ActiveRecord overhead that you don't need.
I would look to write a script or create a stored procedure to do this dependig on your sql implementation. It'll quite likely finish in a few seconds.