embark tests are slooooow

Bug Report

Summary

Embark tests are extremely slow. They are up to 10x slower than using mocha & ganache-cli independently of embark.

Here is a screenshot of running tests before converting to embark (using https://github.com/Giveth/liquidpledging commit 41a087d5093746e87e5031f3f93c0c86db7f347d with command npm run test test/NormalOperation.js):

And here is a screenshot of running tests using the embark framework. Note the tests are essentially the same, the only difference is I’m using embark to start the simulator & execute the tests. I’m still using the same calls & js wrappers as the above screenshot. (using https://github.com/Giveth/liquidpledging/tree/embark commit 9376cfb1e296e67d66d6f6d665f560ecfb3e427e with command embark test test/NormalOperation.js)

Embark does include the gas reporter. If that is the cause of the slowdown, I would recommend not running the gas reporter by default and enabling it with a flag

Please provide additional information about your system

OS: macOS mojave Embark Version: master commit 21dff441d1440a2cac6eb791e3c921da248f741d Node Version: NPM Version:

Sometimes issues are related to Embark’s installation. Can you provide information on how Embark was installed?

[jrainville]

Follow up: I just discovered that it’s Ganache’s provider that is super slow.

This is our current code:

const sim = require('ganache-cli');
self.provider = sim.provider(self.config.contractsConfig.deployment);

When changing it to use Ganache as a server, it’s way faster:

this.sim = require('ganache-cli').server();

this.sim.listen(port, host);

this.web3Endpoint = utils.buildUrl(protocol, host, port);
this.provider = new this.web3.providers.HttpProvider(this.web3Endpoint);

I’ll open an issue on Ganache’s side to see if they can fix that. But we’ll probably keep it as a server for now as it is indeed way faster.

[jrainville]

Here’s the PR with the fix: https://github.com/embark-framework/embark/pull/1108 If you sue it, you will see that it’s still 20 seconds slower than just npm run test. That’s because we run the compilation at the start of the tests and don’t have a way to say, “don’t recompile”.

We’ll see if we do implement that type of option.