Fastest rails test runner: spork and zentest?

Question

I ran across a thread about slow rspec tests that made me wonder which rails test runner configuration will result in the fastest running recurring tests?

I'm aware that ZenTest / autotest-rails can be used in conjunction with spork, but is that the fastest option?

Answer 1

Just wanted to tell you about my experiences.. even tho this doesn't answer you question. I don't have experience with autotest yet, so can't comment on that. This is Rails 3 with RSpec, DatabaseCleaner and FactoryGirl. Here are the results without and with spork:

Finished in 0.22748 seconds
3 examples, 0 failures

real    0m9.541s
user    0m8.733s
sys 0m0.772s



Finished in 0.24727 seconds
3 examples, 0 failures

real    0m0.605s
user    0m0.200s
sys 0m0.080s

So, from 9.541 seconds down to half a second. Roughly a ten fold performance boost.