Malcolm Box wrote:

> Has anyone got any ideas on how to speed this up - for instance, is there a
> way to say "use an existing test database"?

Per my other advice to use fab and a fabfile with a test() target in
it, you should set its (local()) target to something like

   python manage.py test --settings=test_settings

You can also look up my _three_most_recently_changed_applications,
which looks a little bit like this:

  http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.fab.user/1093

to test only 3 apps. But I suspect that's not your problem.

Do not use production fixtures for test fixtures, and if you must use
the spew of dumpdata for fixtures you should manually trim them down
to the minimum needed. Name them different from production fixtures.
We have, naturally, a "countries.json", for all the regions we are
allowed to sell to, and it takes forever to load. I pushed all our
tests to use "sample_countries.json", instead, containing only
countries that Sarah Palin could name on the spot. This made our tests
much faster.

And, finally, your test_settings.py file should use a sqlite3, in-
memory database:

  from settings import *
  DATABASE_ENGINE = 'sqlite3'
  DATABASE_NAME = ":memory:"

>From there, I have only been able to reduce test time down from hours
to minutes. Tests ought to run in seconds - so fast that you can run
them after every few edits - TDD. The LAMP architectures are
spectacularly broke for this endeavor, for a variety of reasons. One
of Django's particular sins is it drags all the data from your JSON
fixtures into fully resolved models.py objects before saving them.
This runs tons of Python code for no reason - you are not testing your
models' validations or save routines. The test runner should instead
push the JSON contents directly into the database as bulk import
statements.

The final benefit of ":memory:" is SQLite3 is very fast when it does
not save anything to disk, so it's the fastest backend possible for
test.

--
  Phlip
  http://penbird.tumblr.com/

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