A JRuby, Rails, RSpec, Spork, and an error walk in to a bar...

I was running a specific rspec over and over during a tight development cycle. The way our system was set up it was taking 30+ sec to run a single spec file, which made running them onerous.

We had Spork running at one point, but it wasn't working for me, with a "undefined method 'flush' for nil:NilClass" error (and a couple of others depending on the incantation):

	$ rspec --drb spec/models/foo_spec.rb .../rubies/jruby-1.6.7/lib/ruby/1.9/drb/drb.rb:375 warning:
	ObjectSpace is disabled; _id2ref only supports immediates, pass -X+O to enable
	NoMethodError: undefined method `flush' for nil:NilClass
	method_missing at .../rubies/jruby-1.6.7/lib/ruby/1.9/drb/drb.rb:1099
	run at .../gems/jruby-1.6.7@cowbania/gems/rspec-core-2.11.1/lib/rspec/core/drb_command_line.rb:22
	run at .../gems/jruby-1.6.7@cowbania/gems/rspec-core-2.11.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:63
	autorun at .../gems/jruby-1.6.7@cowbania/gems/rspec-core-2.11.1/lib/rspec/core/runner.rb:8

view raw 01_error.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

After upgrading Spork (we had been running an older version), setting the JRUBY_OPTS environment variable, and restarting Spork, the spec time dropped to ~8 sec. Still not particularly fast, but faster-enough to make it worth it.

gem 'spork', '~> 1.0rc'

view raw 02_Gemfile.rb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

	export JRUBY_OPTS="--1.9 -J-XX:MaxPermSize=512m -J-Xmx1g -X+O"
	spork rspec

view raw 03_cmd.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Not currently running Guard. Not sure if the upgrade or opts made it start working.

This post is a work-in-progress.