[How to] Run PHPUnit tests using database 10x faster
Overview
PHPUnit tests that are heavily using the database can run like 10x faster when you run the database from the RAMDisk.
It's the easiest way I know to improve the speed of the tests execution.
Problem - PHPUnit tests can run long time when they are using the database
Project I'm contributing at my work - License Statistics - uses quite a lot of unit tests.
One of the reasons is that we try to do the Test Driven Development (TDD). But this method of creating the software has some drawbacks.
Right now we have something around 1 000 tests that check around 3 000 assertions. Much of them involve database operations. That's why running all tests on Windows machine can take up to 25 minutes.
Tests on Linux machine are much faster - around 7-10 minutes but we still need to run tests under Windows environment due to fact we have to support both platforms and we have to be sure that both of them work perfectly fine.
