Reduce time required to run unit tests

[nemesifier]

The entire test suite takes too much time to run.

Possible solutions:

• find out which tests take a long time to be executed and resolve the causes
• find out if it's possible to avoid re-create the database structure at each run
• upgrade to django 1.8 and use the --keep-db flag: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/testing/overview/#id2

Ideally each test suite should take less than a couple of minutes to run, while the entire test suite shouldn't take longer than 10 minutes, although now we are quite far from this result!

Useful resources:

• run postgis in memory: http://techblog.ironfroggy.com/2011/01/how-to-speed-up-django-tests-on.html
• postgresql, disable fsync: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/runtime-config-wal.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3799061/speeding-up-django-testing
• http://www.daveoncode.com/2013/09/23/effective-tdd-tricks-to-speed-up-django-tests-up-to-10x-faster/
• http://www.slideshare.net/cordiskinsey/djangocon-2013-how-to-write-fast-and-efficient-unit-tests-in-django

UPDATE

I wrote a wrap up here: http://nemesisdesign.net/blog/coding/how-to-speed-up-tests-django-postgresql/

[nemesifier]

Postgresql tweaks to add on the docs:

# /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/postgresql.conf
fsync = off
synchronous_commit = off
full_page_writes = off

[nemesifier]

django 1.8 --keepdb option for the test command, plus the postgresql.conf optimizations are the real winners.

There are a few other slow tests that will need to be refactored or mocked.

[nemesifier]

Now is very fast!! :+1: