Slow Unit Tests for Peter Parker

[Owen Arnold]

We have a number of slow running unit tests which we need to fix as part of the 3.3 maintenance window. We are targeting test suits than execute in > 2 seconds on our clean rhel6 build servers. For IO tests (Loading & Saving) we have applied a more generous threshold of > 5 seconds.

See the full list to see which tests have been assigned to you: http://www.mantidproject.org/images/2/2f/Slow_tests.xlsx_-_Sheet1.pdf

Criteria

1. Test suits (each test class instance) should execute in < 1 second as a rough target
2. As a corollary to the above, If the test suite contains lots of test methods aim for < 0.1 second per test method
3. If for some reason you get the speed up the test below the target using the strategies listed below, you need to justify why when you close the ticket.

Guidelines/instructions to help

1. Keep tests readable and improve code readability where possible. Unit tests are documentation.
2. Do not delete test methods without good reason. We do not want to reduce test coverage
3. Changing the algorithm code to improve speed is OK, but exercise caution. Add additional test coverage if it's not already good enough.
4. Take test methods that are slow and involve IO, or are processor intensive and make them into system tests. Integration tests are not Unit tests.
5. Most of the speed improvements will probably come from better selection of input data. Caching input data is also a good option.
6. Create sub tickets for algorithms or groups of algorithms to help testability if you wish, but mark this ticket as the 'blocked' by each one.

[Peter Parker]

Tests of workflow algorithms are by definition integration tests, so ideally it would make sense for all of WorkflowAlgorithmsTest to be moved over to system tests.

In this ticket I'll only address SANSSolidAngleCorrectionTest (the only test over the threshold time of 2 seconds) and SANSBeamFluxCorrectionTest / EQSANSQ2DTest (which are python tests and so are easy to convert).

I've opened #9975 to cover the rest of the C++ tests in the project.

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Remove EQSANSQ2DTest as unit test.

Changeset: 5440b930e15354fbb73b0d1aeb747bdfc6ad1bb3

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Remove SANSBeamFluxCorrectionTest as unit test.

Changeset: 560fbc3d45d78884ef4d4ca913189fdd98981ff6

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Remove SANSSolidAngleCorrectionTest as unit test.

Changeset: f5f30faa6eccfa984a54f50537f36bacd802c603

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Reinstate EQSANSQ2D as system test.

Changeset: d09b6a895e19d43647fb5f00c55014974584d8ff

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Reinstate SANSBeamFluxCorrectionTest as system test.

Changeset: 3008d469f27d69998208ea53504429f236f20246

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Reinstate SANSSolidAngleCorrectionTest as system test.

Changeset: 11fe31d1ce1646568306812a39437df5feb3d90d

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Revert past 3 commits.

So that I may find out why an unrelated unit test is now failing as a result of moving these other tests.

Changeset: a2eaf6cee1ff01716eca7dac0076674842c97d03

[Nick Draper]

Moved to the backlog at the code freeze of R3.3

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Reinstate reverted changes.

This reverts commit a2eaf6cee1ff01716eca7dac0076674842c97d03.

Changeset: f787013c35b0037dec6ef2ceea753660a68a9983

[Peter Parker]

Refs #9896 - Extend linking trick so that StepScanTest may pass.

Changeset: 1a8aa29ac37cdcc8e4733756033ee655030ab032

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​10738