Speed up unittest's

[nskinkel]

Unit tests are running way too slow. This is because we're downloading a new consensus and copy of server descriptors for each test file (and in netstatus' case, for every test).

This is bad.

We should:

• remove test_netstatus.py from the default test suite (it should only be run explicitly by itself)
• for all other tests, read descriptor info and consensus info from file instead of from network

The only real challenge here will be that the information will go out of date after a while, so reading from a file will eventually just fail to make connections to certain routers, causing mysterious errors.

The solution is to write a test driver that can grab new copies of the documents at some interval and then supply them to the test cases to use.

This should be done in demo/master.

[dwtj]

Why would the connection being unable to connect to a router be a "mysterious error". That should be a common exception that we need to catch.

Anyway, how you solve this is completely up to you, but here's a thought.

What if we had copies of the consensus and the descriptor file in something like oppy/tests/data. Any new copies that were downloaded by the "real" unit test could be put in here. Then whenever you instantiated a netstatus object you passed a flag to distinguish between three different modes:

• Normal application mode
• Test mode with dummy data
• Test mode with real dynamically downloaded data.

This issue is part of a larger more general one. Twisted unit tests should avoid making any network connections. However, mocking tests, esp. network connection/protocol tests would be a lot of work, way too much for us at this stage.

[nskinkel]

Yea that's along the lines of what I was thinking.

Only mysterious error at this early stage because (at least speaking for myself) some parts of code need a lot more robust error checking that's currently lacking and probably won't be implemented before the demo.