Capybara with page model is very slow

Question

I'm refactoring my integration specs to use a page objects pattern. I'm testing a JS application with no database. I'm using poltergest.

When I abstract out my selectors into a page object, my tests slow down considerably.

require 'benchmark'

class HostsPage
  include Capybara::DSL

  def has_search_results?
    has_css?('.results')
  end
end

feature 'blaa blaa' do
  let(:host) { HostsPage.new }

  before do
    visit('/')
    click_link 'Query Hosts'
  end

  scenario 'User does something' do
    puts Benchmark.measure { host.has_search_results? }
    puts Benchmark.measure { have_css('.results') }

    skip
  end
end

This outputs:

0.030000   0.010000   0.040000 (  2.051050)
0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000008)

As you can see, the first result is much slower than the second and the tests are basically the same except the page object abstraction.

My spec_helper is:

require 'capybara/rspec'
require 'capybara/poltergeist'

Dir[File.expand_path(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'support', '**', '*.rb'))].each { |f| require f }

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.order = :random
  config.warnings = false

  Capybara.default_driver = :poltergeist

  Capybara.app = App.new # this points to a basic Sinatra app that serves index.html
end

How would I trace this down? What is the cause?

Answer 1

It has nothing to do with the page model:

puts Benchmark.measure { has_css?('.results') }
puts Benchmark.measure { have_css('.results') }

Returns

0.030000   0.010000   0.040000 (  2.005658)
0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.000008)

So, the has_css? have_css methods are quite different.

For has_css?, Capybara is waiting for the timeout to expire.