pgtestdb's Template Cloning Approach to Testing is Fast

Just want to say thank you, Brandur, for checking out pgtesdb and benchmarking it so thoroughly. I’m pleased that it performs so well and I’m going to throw some tokens and brainpower at potentially implementing a cleanup+reuse+pool of successful dbs instead of always tearing them down.

Some confusion in the threads below —

pgtestdb is just a primitive for “give my test a clean db, fast.” With your postgres running on ramdisk, I don’t think there’s any faster way to make a clean and fully migrated db — and your migrations only run one time, no matter how many test processes you have operating concurrently or how many tests are in parallel within those processes.

You can actually combine it with test transactions, you’re totally allowed to do anything you want with the db! It just so happens that it’s fast enough (in my experience) to Just Give Every Test Its Own Database, for quite a large number of tests.

Really cool upside of AI is enabling experiments like this one that previously would have been prohibitively time consuming. Thanks again, Brandur.

In the past few years I've been using a "dirty db" approach to testing where I run parallel integration tests against a single postgres-based backend without any cleanup between tests. Every test hits the same db with unique ID's. The constraint is that you can't assert exact counts, you need to assert that specific ID's exist. With this setup, the db just gets setup once and all the tests can run in parallel. Integration points are where I've seen the most breakage in prod, so I like to test with a real db. Parallelism makes it fast and incidentally this approach sometimes catches racy interactions that otherwise might only see with concurrent prod requests (heisenbugs in waiting). Many tests hitting the API's in parallel ends up being a better simulation of prod behavior.

If you don't need SET LOCAL or different isolation levels in your tests, the fastest by far in my experience is to have a template DB per process (perhaps migrating it once and then using it as template to make copies), then run your tests wrapped in a transaction that you rollback at the end.

Postgres rollback is essentially instant, since all the cleanup is left to a later vacuum. Postgres can handle "nested transactions" (savepoints), so in most cases you don't have to modify your code.

For the small set of tests that aren't compatible with being wrapped in a transaction, you run them serially in each process and either DELETE or TRUNCATE CASCADE in between for cleanup. DELETE is a bit faster, but then you have to deal with foreign key issues yourself.

There's more that can go wrong when relying on transaction rollback. But in terms of speed, I don't know of a faster way.

The original developer of a Rails project I inherited decided to seed the test db with db/seed.rb and tie every test to the content of the seed. There were a lot of tests so rewriting then was not an option, not immediately.

I wrote the new tests in the canonical way but I still had the problem of all those seconds spent seeding the db even when I run a single test. I wrote a couple of scripts that dumped the db at the end of the tests (if a dump did not exist yet) and reloaded it at the beginning of the tests. This is much faster. I still have to clear the test db and reseed it when I switch branch, because I don't have a dump list branch.

Maybe I can create a template with the data in it. Or finally rewrite every single old test.