Before running Spork, we can get a baseline for the testing overhead by timing our test suite as follows:

Here the test suite takes more than 7 seconds to run even though the actual tests run in under a tenth of a second. To speed this up, we can open a dedicated terminal window, navigate to the application root directory, and then start a Spork server:

(To eliminate the need to prefix the command with bundle exec, re-follow the steps in Section 3.6.1.) In another terminal window, we can now run our test suite with the --drb (‘‘distributed Ruby’’) option and verify that the environment-loading overhead is greatly reduced:

It’s inconvenient to have to include the --drb option every time we run rspec, so I recommend adding it to the .rspec file in the application’s root directory, as shown in Listing 3.37