How to Speed up image processing of Paperclip in Acceptance Tests

Question

When running capybara feature specs I can see lots of Slow factory notices which are populated byfactory_girl. These Slow factory things heavy slow down the feature specs, I think, even feature specs are intrinsic slow specs. Then I had some inspect and found out most of the Slow factory was caused bypaperclip. We had model using paperclip here:

FactoryGirl.define do 
  factory :asset do 
    image Rails.root.join('spec/fixtures/sample.jpg').open 
  end 
end

So I wonder if there's a way like test mode for paperclip to speed up tests. I have simple solution here: Just copy the original file instead of actually crop it.

Answer 1

How many times do you test the same paths with this? Maybe judicious use of before(:all) for some tests might speed things up as well? Another though (not really knowing if this makes sense) — if your image is 1x1 pixels does it do anything? You really should not need to test the actual image rendering bits more than once or twice in your whole suite.