I recently discovered that bundler has a feature to create binstubs, so I decided to redo my benchmarks of running a single pending spec (but including the complete spec_helper for my project).

To create rspec binstubs:

$ bundle binstubs rspec-core

Here are my findings:

Description   Command Avg. Time (3 runs)
Bundled Rspec   bundle exec rspec 61.76 s
Binstubs   bin/rspec 50.24 s
Binstubs + Spork   bin/rspec --drb 17.43 s
Binstubs + Spork + Nailgun   jruby --ng -S bin/rspec --drb 6.65 s

It is still slower than I would like, but well worth the effort. Since I didn’t want to remember the specific invocation depending on what I have running, I have a script that will use binstubs, nailgun and/or spork if available:

#! /bin/bash

# Looking for binstubs
if [ -f ./bin/rspec ]; then
  RSPEC="bin/rspec"
else
  RSPEC="bundle exec rspec"
fi

NAILGUN_PORT=2113
SPORK_PORT=8989

# Looking for nailgun
lsof -i :$NAILGUN_PORT > /dev/null
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
  RSPEC="jruby --ng -S $RSPEC"
fi

# Looking for spork
lsof -i :$SPORK_PORT > /dev/null
if [ $? == 0 ]; then
  RSPEC="$RSPEC --drb"
fi

CMD="$RSPEC $@"
echo $CMD
$CMD