Causes open sources Buffet, a Ruby testing framework.

https://github.com/causes/buffet

by johnfn • 15 years ago

26 11 15 years ago

github.com

grimen2• 15 years ago

So the question that remains after reading the README is...what does it do? :)

johnfn4• 15 years ago

Ah, didn't realize that was ambiguous. I edited the opening - does that make it more clear?

grimen2• 15 years ago

Yes now I got it. :)

mattraibert• 15 years ago

How are people using this? For having an incredibly fast suite of unit tests (i.e. speed up your suite from 25 seconds to 5 seconds)? Or are we talking about a 25 hour build that now runs in 5 hours?

johnfn4• 15 years ago

It speeds up about linearly; 5 more machines will make it run about 5 times as fast, etc. For incredibly fast suites, it isn't very helpful, because the startup and sync times across machines outweigh the benefits.

At causes, our tests run in about 20 minutes on 1 machine, and 4 minutes with buffet and 5.

kunley• 15 years ago

While this is cool, I must admin it's a bit "worse is better" approach. Wouldn't be cooler just to unbloat existing test tools?

johnfn4• 15 years ago

I don't think so. I mean, RSpec is pretty fast as is, at least for running only hundreds of tests. The problem we were encountering is that if you want to get full coverage, some tests will have to hit the database or do other (mildly) time consuming tasks, and if you have a large enough test suite doing these things all over the place, they tend to add up into ridiculously long test runs.

rawsyntax• 15 years ago

sounds like another hydra ( https://github.com/ngauthier/hydra ). It distributes your tests across processor cores, and optionally remote workers (other machines)

Why is Buffet better? (I'm genuinely interested)

johnfn4• 15 years ago

This is a good question, because we actually were using Hydra for a while. We ran into a lot of problems where hydra workers would just hang once they finished their test (used strace to see what they were doing, and it looked like they were stuck in some sort of infinite loop). Hydra caused enough headaches that we just stopped using it; out of that frustration, Buffet was born. We tried pretty hard to make Buffet 'just work' and stable.

RobertLowe• 15 years ago

As far as I know Hydra can't run on 1.9 ( https://github.com/ngauthier/hydra/issues/29 )

Alternatively, you have parallel_tests ( https://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests ) which can run on multiple cores. That's great if you use a mac pro, or some behemoth machine.

Little known there's testbot ( https://github.com/joakimk/testbot ) which can run tests across machines & cores. They've even worked in a bootstrapping process https://github.com/joakimk/testbot_cloud

From ( https://github.com/joakimk/testbot/wiki/How-testbot-is-used ) "... 60 minutes of tests to run in 10 minutes using 16 medium EC2 instances (32 cores), read the blog post." reports thoughtbot!

Code softly hackers.

tonycoco• 15 years ago

Isn't this exactly like travisci?

Causes open sources Buffet, a Ruby testing framework.

Related Stories