Long-as-hell Ruby on Rails RSpec test running times are making you ask “what the deuce?” Specs are taking way too long to run, but the prospect of looking through them all one at a time to find offending external dependencies, net calls that should be mocked, etc is driving you to drink. You just want a read-out of the tests that are taking the longest so you can refactor ASAP.

Sound familiar?

I was in this boat until I found out about the profiling command:

The double “spec” here can be a bit confusing. The first is the command, and the second is the directory (RAILS_ROOT/spec) that you’re running it on. The -f is the format flag. You can see a list of all formats with:

Basically you’re just passing the “profile” argument to the formatting command. It gives you a readout of the 10 most time-intensive specs at the top and then a nicely verbose list of all pending and failed tests. Using this list, I was able to go straight to the most obnoxious offenders and eliminate the external dependencies (these specs happened to be fetching feeds) that were slowing my test suite down. In less than 15 minutes, I had chopped my execution time down to 10% of what it was before I started.

Huzzah!