performance - How to speed up grails test execution

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.