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

Are you running this over Rails? If so, it's not RSpec's initialization that's slow, it's Rails'. Rails has to initialize the entire codebase and yours before running the specs. Well, it doesn't have to, but it does. RSpec runs pretty fast for me under my small non-rails projects.