Speed Up Your Rails Test Suite By 6% In 1 Line

At one project we have a set of currently 3k+ tests, running more than 2 minutes. Most of the test cases rely on the DB, and ActiveRecord logs all queries by default. The test.log grows by around 20M per suite run.

Once again deleting an overgrown local log file, I thought that we don’t really need it and logging in a test mode should be better disabled by default.

Measurement of success

And I also decided to benchmark the tests to measure a potential gain in speed.

Turned out, there was. I created a branch with disabled logging in the test environment and ran the test suite 40 times, switching between branches each time. It was decided to do so instead of running test series for each branch separately, so that other tasks my PC was performing, did not affect only one batch of the results. I also left the PC running alone so that every run received about the same amount of resources.

My batch test script was like this:

for i in {1..20}; \
  git checkout disable-test-log; \
  { time -p rake test &>/dev/null ; } 2>&1 | grep real | sed 's/real //' >> test_runs_nologs; \
  git checkout master; \
  { time -p rake test &>/dev/null ; } 2>&1 | grep real | sed 's/real //' >> test_runs_default; \
done

I used Bash time command to get the total execution time instead of the time shown by the test suite itself because the test suite always shows lesser time than the test really takes.

One and a half hours later I had the results. For the default branch the mean time was 125.6s with a standard error of 0.26, and for the branch with logs disabled it was 116.9 with SE of 0.34. So the gain in speed was 8.7s or 6.93%.

This seemed like too much, so I decided the reason was that I ran my tests on an HDD which is, of course, obsolete and inferior technology. So I cloned the repository to an SSD and repeated the experiment.

Surprisingly, the results were very similar to those from HDD: 120.07s with logs with 0.19 SE, 112.46s without logs with 0.53 SE. Or 6.34% speed gain from the default value.

And since I was already cloning the repo around, I also cloned it to a tmpfs partition, which is a file system residing in RAM (or swap file, but in my case only RAM). The results were slightly different but still in favor of disabled logs: 118.92s (0.21 SE), 115.13s (1.98 SE) or 3.18% gain.

So roughly half of the gained time was spent on disk latency and the other half on the logging logic.

How to disable logging in test environment

There’s not much documentation on how you can disable logging completely, so I had to experiment, and the only thing I came up with is adding this to config/environments/test.rb:

config.logger = Logger.new(nil)
config.log_level = :fatal

Apparently if you write config.logger = nil it’s the same as not write anything at all because the default logger gets created. So I created a Logger which logs to nothing. I also have set the highest error level so that it didn’t even try to log anything but FATAL messages.

There are some cases when you might need the test log. So to avoid editing the environment configuration, you can add an environment variable flag that will enable the logging:

unless ENV['RAILS_ENABLE_TEST_LOG']
  config.logger = Logger.new(nil)
  config.log_level = :fatal
end

And then to run the tests with logging enabled, you execute command:

    $ RAILS_ENABLE_TEST_LOG=1 rake test

Paul Keen is an Open Source Contributor and a Chief Technology Officer at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.

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