Optimizing Capybara Tests for Performance in a Ruby on Rails Application
I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. Recently started working with a Ruby on Rails application that uses Capybara for end-to-end testing. The test suite is becoming increasingly slow, and it's affecting our development cycle. The suite contains more than 200 tests, and the execution time has risen to over 30 minutes. To address this, I've been trying to identify the bottlenecks in our Capybara tests. I've explored options such as: 1. **Database Transactions**: I'm wrapping tests in transactions to prevent database bloat, but it seems to have limited impact on speed. Here’s how I’m currently doing this: ```ruby RSpec.configure do |config| config.use_transactional_fixtures = true end ``` 2. **Headless Browsers**: Switching to a headless mode with Chrome has helped slightly, but not significantly. Here's the capybara driver setup: ```ruby Capybara.register_driver :headless_chrome do |app| Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome, options: Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new(args: ['headless'])) end Capybara.javascript_driver = :headless_chrome ``` 3. **Selective Testing**: I introduced tags to run only a subset of tests related to the features I’m currently working on. This speeds things up during development, as I can run tests like this: ```ruby it 'does something important', :focus do # test code end ``` 4. **Parallel Tests**: Implementing parallel tests using `parallel_tests` gem has shown promise, but I'm facing issues with state sharing between tests. Here’s the command I'm using to run tests in parallel: ```bash bundle exec parallel_rspec spec/features --test_file_count 4 ``` Despite these optimizations, I still see slow performance during tests that involve multiple page loads or heavy JavaScript. I suspect that some of the pages are loading unnecessary assets that might be slowing down the tests. Is there a recommended approach for optimizing asset loading in Capybara tests? I'd love suggestions on how I might further improve performance without sacrificing test coverage. Any insights into effectively managing the state and improving runtime for feature tests would be greatly appreciated. I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning Ruby. Any examples would be super helpful.