Speed up slow unit testing for a rails app on Windows?

Question

I'm looking for the quickest way to run unit tests for a rails app on a Windows machine, preferably automatically. My environment is:

• Ruby 1.8.7
• Rails 3.0.9
• ZenTest 3.6.0 (the latest versions 4.6.2/4.5.0 failed when I tried them for some reason)

Currently they run very slowly, eg. 30s to run a suite of 12 very simple unit tests, time mostly spent starting ruby it seems. The tests themselves take 5s to run according to autotest. For someone used to running 100s of tests in 10s, this is agony, and makes TDD infeasible. I'd even be happy if I could re-run one unit test in less than 5s...

I've searched other questions. Some are old and some conflict. What's the latest accepted wisdom on this? Here are the suggestions I'm aware of:

• Use faster_require and/or faster_gem_script (though I had problems getting this working...)
• Try JRuby (though that seems as slow starting?)
• Upgrade ruby to 1.9.x
• spork?
• doze?
• rails-dev-boost?

Getting a Linux box (or VMware) is out of the question at present, though getting more tempting...

Answer 1

You may want to look at something like spork (and a blog entry).