Why is RSpec so slow under Rails?

Question

Whenever I run rspec tests for my Rails application it takes forever and a day of overhead before it actually starts running tests. Why is rspec so slow? Is there a way to

Answer 1

because it loads all the environement, loads fixtures and all that jazz.

The real culprit is if you run it using rake spec, it runs the db:test:prepare task.

This task drops your entire test database and re-creates it from scratch. This seems ridiculous to me, but that's what it does (the same thing happens when you run rake:test:units etc).

You can easily work around this using the spec application which rspec installs as part of the rspec gem.

Like this:

cd railsapp
spec spec # run all specs without rebuilding the whole damn database
spec spec/models # run model specs only

cd spec
spec controllers/user* # run specs for controllers that start with user