[ckan-dev] test performance and sqlalchemy complete

[Seb Bacon]

Hi,

I've finished the saga that was upgrading sqlalchemy and also getting
tests to run against sqlite.  Huge thanks to David for doing a code
review and suggesting further changes. For the record, here's the
speed improvements on my box for each incremental change (I'd be
interested to know speed improvements on other platforms):

1) benchmark to start with: 41m (this is on Lucid, so the worst case)
2) changes and optimisations of the test suite, plus turning off
postgres durability settings: 21m
3) upgrade to sqlalchemy 0.6: 16m
4) using sqlite in-memory database: 5m

The work closes tickets #876 and #576, but unfortunately I seem to
have forgotten my password, and the password reminder function is
broken (can anyone help?!)

Below is an extract from the updated README.txt to fill you in on
getting tests to run faster on your box.

This is all in my fork at https://bitbucket.org/sebbacon/ckan, which
hopefully someone will pull to the main repo soon.  Note that for all
the tests to pass, you also need an updated VDM (currently in my
bitbucket account, also needs to be pulled).  The test suite passes
against sqlalchemy 0.4.8 and 0.6.5, but as we don't have 100% coverage
we should be really careful to user test it thoroughly before
deploying.

Seb

--------
from README.txt:

The test suite takes a very long time to run against a standard
postgres.  You can make postgres run faster by turning off durability
as described at
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/non-durability.html>.

Even with durability turned off, the full test suite can take around
15 minutes to run.  If you test against an in-memory sqlite database,
this can drop to as low as 5 minutes.  To do this, uncomment the
following line in test.ini:

::

  sqlalchemy.url = sqlite:///

.. caution ::

   Note that (a) some search-related tests are currently skipped due
   to postgres-specific code; and (b) only postgres is currently
   supported in production anyway.  Therefore, you should treat the
   sqlite support as a convenience during development, and always run
   the tests against postgres as a final check.