While developing a Grails 1.0.5 app I'm appalled at how slow the grails test-app
command is. Even though the actual tests take just ~10 seconds, the whole execution adds up to
real 1m26.953s
user 0m53.955s
sys 0m1.860s
This includes grails bootstrapping, loading plugins, compiling all the code, etc.
Any hints on how to speed up the grails test-app
execution would be greatly appreciated.
You can use interactive mode to speed up your test runs.
Just run
grails interactive
Then type
test-app
The first time will be the same as usual but each time after that will be dramatically faster. There are currently some issues with interactive mode (like running out of memory after a few runs) but I still find it worth it.
There aren't any hard and fast rules for speeding it up, and the performance issues that you're seeing might be specific to your app.
If your bootstrapping is taking ~75 seconds, that sounds pretty long. I'd take a close look at whatever you have in your Bootstrap.groovy file to see if that can be slimmed down.
Do you have any extra plugins that you might not need (or that could have a major performance penalty)?
This might not be a possibility for you right now, but the speed improvements in grails 1.1.1/groovy 1.6.3 over grails 1.0.5/groovy 1.5.7 are fairly significant.
Another thing that really helps me when testing, is to specify only integration tests or only unit tests if I'm workiing on one or the other:
grails test-app -unit
grails test-app -integration
You can also specify a particular test class (without the "Tests" prefix), to run a single test which can really help with TDD (ex for "MyServiceTests" integration):
grails test-app -integration MyService
In grails 1.1.1, bootstrapping with 5 plugins and ~40 domain classes takes me less than 20 seconds.
If you're still using Groovy 1.5.x you could probably of shave a few seconds by upgrading to Groovy 1.6
Please see my answer here. A plugin relying on a poorly defined maven artifact can cause grails to go and look every time for a newer version.
Grails very slow to resolve certain dependencies
You can choose to run unit and integration tests in parallel as well - see this article
Increasing the java memory/JVM options can definitely speed things up. The amount of memory you can give depends on your equipment.
If you are running grails from the command line, set the GRAILS_OPTS
environment variable. Add something like this to ~/.bash_profile
export GRAILS_OPTS="-Xms3000M -Xmx3000M -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"
If you use GGTS(Eclipse) you'll need to add this to the VM arguments of the run configuration.
![](https://www.manongdao.com/static/images/pcload.jpg)
There are also a few JVM settings that can be modified to increase the speed:
-XX:+UseCodeCacheFlushing
-XX:MaxInlineLevel=15
-noverify (turns off class validation)
grails now comes with http://grails.org/plugin/testing installed. this mocks the domain stuff, so you can do some testing of domain classes as unit tests. they run pretty fast.