David Craven <david@craven.ch> writes:

> Ludo: Is there any way we can speed up the installer system tests? :)

I've also wondered about this.  I'm not sure how long each test takes to
run, so an analysis of the tests to find their slow areas might help
guide us.  I suspect that we could probably speed up the tests by using
a shared test fixture of some kind (e.g., a common store, or a base qemu
disk image [1], which could be used by multiple tests), but first we'd
need to know which part(s) are slow.

Another possibility might be to parallelize the tests (I don't think the
system tests are done in parallel right now, even if you specify "make
-j", but someone correct me if I'm wrong), but that could be
counter-productive if it took up too many system resources.

For now, if you've got a specific test you want to exercise repeatedly,
you can run just that one test (e.g., "make check-system TESTS="basic
mcron").  That should speed things up if one test is all you need.

[1]  https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU/Images#Copy_on_write

-- 
Chris