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 are on a Windows environment then there is probably little you can do as Rails seems to startup really slowly under Windows. I had the same experience on Windows and had to move my setup to a Linux VM to make it really zippy (I was also using autotest).