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

If you're using a Mac I recommend using Rspactor over autotest as it uses a lot fewer resources for polling changed files than autotest. There is both a full Cocoa version

RSpactor.app

or the gem version that I maintain at Github

sudo gem install pelle-rspactor

While these don't speed up individual rspec tests, they feel much faster as they auto run the affected spec's within a second of you hitting save.