Profiling RSpec examples with Stackprof

Finding out why a particular spec is slow might be tricky. Thanks to Aman Gupta, we have stackprof - a sampling call-stack profiler for ruby 2.1+.

I have used it a lot while working on RubyBench and finding slow parts of code in Rails stack, but never in specs. Yesterday I had to find out why my RSpec example was slow and I wrote this snippet:

{% highlight ruby %}

spec/spec_helper.rb

RSpec.configure do |config| config.around(:each) do |example| path = Rails.root.join("tmp/stackprof-cpu-test-#{example.full_description.parameterize}.dump") StackProf.run(mode: :cpu, out: path.to_s) do example.run end end end {% endhighlight %}

This snippet profiles every example block in your test file and saves the dump into tmp/, for instance tmp/stackprof-cpu-test-posts-controller-get-works.

Later, you can use bundle exec stackprof to analize the dump.

In my case, stackprof helped me to realize that most of the time in specs was spent on SASS compilation:

stackprof dump

Happy debugging!

NB: you do not need to keep the profiling enabled all the time. Use the snippet only when you need to debug a specific case.

Written in October 2015.
Kir Shatrov

Kir Shatrov helps businesses to grow by scaling the infrastructure. He writes about software, scalability and the ecosystem. Follow him on Twitter to get the latest updates.