Improving Entity Framework Performance during testing

Question

I'm trying to reduce the startup time for tests against an EF 6x datastore. The tests are within a transaction and the db gets rolled back once done. I would appreciate any suggestions on how to retain an instance of the DbContext between test sessions so that EF doesn't have to go through the whole view generation process again?

I don't want to use mocks/fakes, non-Microsoft branch of EF and interactive views are already in place. Thank you.

Answer 1

Different options. As you did not mentioned your aim of testing and there is not any code, the options are:

1. If you are inserting many records into your tables, you can do a bulk insert. The best library for doing this is:EntityFramework.BulkInsert-ef6. You can install it through Nuget console.

2. If you see slowness while working with data and you have many load/manipulation/save operations, you have to do in-memory operation as Sampath recommends.

3. If you are loading data, just load the columns that you need. You also should use lazy loading option(which from your post, I think you know it well).

4.Some portion of the slowness could be because of the architecture of your database. The key column types have a considerable effect on Where operations!