CODEWITHSUNDEEP
scalaintellij-ideaplayframework-2.3
jespeno
jespeno

Reputation: 159

Building tests in Intellij for Play Framework is very slow

Is there a way to speed up the build time of unit tests for Play Framework in Intellij? I am doing TDD. Whenever I execute a test, it takes about 30 - 60 seconds to compile. Even a simple Hello World test takes time. Rerunning the same test even without any change will still start the make process.

I am on Intellij 14.1, on Play 2.3.8, written in Scala.

I already tried setting the java compiler to eclipse, and also tried setting Scala compiler to SBT.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 1781

Answers (3)

jespeno
jespeno

Reputation: 159

In intellij 14.1.2, the workaround I did is to:

1) Remove make from tests (Edit Configurations -> Defaults -> Scala Test -> Before launch -> (-) Make)

2) Start activator (or play) with ~ test:compile (ex: activator ~test:compile) or (sbt ~ test:compile)

This prevents Intellij from calling a play compilation server every time a make is invoked. The compilation is delegated to an external sbt/activator/play process to do the continuous compilation. The disadvantage is that, when you run your test immediately before the compilation completes, you may get a NoClassDefinedFound exception. Also, you will need to monitor an extra process. This setup however, is so much faster compared to the default setup by Intellij (for now). Hope this helps anyone.

Upvotes: 3

Ed Staub
Ed Staub

Reputation: 15690

I'm going to assume that you know that the problem is build-time - that the actual run-time for the tests themselves is negligible.

What do you have for hardware? In my experience, 4GB RAM is not enough for Intellij Scala to perform well - it needs a big disk cache (which the OS uses free RAM for), I think. An SSD helps, too. Use Performance Monitor or analogous for your OS to see whether the time is disk, CPU, or net. If it's CPU, consider whether heap-size may be a problem.

What is your build process like? Are there sbt plugins? How big is your project?

UPDATE

Triggering a full rebuild without changes is wrong. Is there something in your tests that is modifying the project directories? If you run a dummy no-op test, does it do the same thing? Are you maybe writing logs into the project tree, for instance?

In my limited experience, full Play builds under Intellij are orders of magnitude slower than a pure Scala build - I'd guess because of all the SBT plugins (view compiler, xScript compiler, xSS compiler, etc) that have to run. But incrementals aren't that painful.

On OSX, read "Activity Monitor" for "Performance Monitor".

UPDATE

See Intellij issue SCL-8235 for other folks' experience and workarounds for slow incremental Play builds. Vote for the issue to increase its priority and get it fixed quicker.

Upvotes: 2

Mon Calamari
Mon Calamari

Reputation: 4463

What about unmarking existing tests and leaving only yours? Right click on test directory (which should be green) and Unmark as Test Source Root.

Upvotes: 0

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