How to speed up grails test execution

Question

While developing a Grails 1.0.5 app I'm appalled at how slow the grails test-app command is. Even though the actual tests take just ~10 seconds, the whole execution adds up to

real 1m26.953s user 0m53.955s sys 0m1.860s

This includes grails bootstrapping, loading plugins, compiling all the code, etc.

Any hints on how to speed up the grails test-app execution would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use interactive mode to speed up your test runs.

Just run

grails interactive

Then type

test-app

The first time will be the same as usual but each time after that will be dramatically faster. There are currently some issues with interactive mode (like running out of memory after a few runs) but I still find it worth it.

Answer 2

There aren't any hard and fast rules for speeding it up, and the performance issues that you're seeing might be specific to your app.

If your bootstrapping is taking ~75 seconds, that sounds pretty long. I'd take a close look at whatever you have in your Bootstrap.groovy file to see if that can be slimmed down.

Do you have any extra plugins that you might not need (or that could have a major performance penalty)?

This might not be a possibility for you right now, but the speed improvements in grails 1.1.1/groovy 1.6.3 over grails 1.0.5/groovy 1.5.7 are fairly significant.

Another thing that really helps me when testing, is to specify only integration tests or only unit tests if I'm workiing on one or the other:

grails test-app -unit

grails test-app -integration

You can also specify a particular test class (without the "Tests" prefix), to run a single test which can really help with TDD (ex for "MyServiceTests" integration):

grails test-app -integration MyService

In grails 1.1.1, bootstrapping with 5 plugins and ~40 domain classes takes me less than 20 seconds.