RavenDB: Fixing Up the Build Process

there is a big problem in the ravendb build process. to be rather more exact, there is a… long problem in the ravendb build process.

as you can imagine, when the build process run for that long, it doesn’t' get run too often. we already had several runs of “let us optimize the build”. but… the actual reason for the tests taking this long is a bit sneaky.

to save you from having to do the math, this means an average of 1.15 seconds per test.

in most tests, we actually have to create a ravendb instance. that doesn’t take too long, but it does take some time. and we have a lot of tests that uses the network, because we need to test how ravendb works on the wire.

from that perspective, it means that we don’t seem to have any real options. even if we cut the average cost of running the tests by half, it would still be a 30 minutes build process.

instead, we are going to create a layered approach. we are going to freeze all of our existing tests, move them to an integration tests project. we will create a small suite of tests that cover just core stuff with ravendb, and use that. over time, we will be adding tests to the new test project. when that becomes too slow, we will have another migration.

what about the integration tests? well, those will be run solely by our build server, and we will setup things so we can automatically test when running from our own forks, not the main code line.