This reduced launch time of rspec for my rails project in Ubuntu VirtualBox on Win7 host from 35 secs to 2 sec.



sudo gem install spork --prerelease


Or add following to Rails Gemfile:

gem 'spork', '>= 0.9.0.rc'

and run

sudo bundle


Run in your Rails project root.

spork --bootstrap

This will add some code and instructions to spec/spec_helper.rb. Follow the instructions and distribute configuration between sections.

Start spork server:

spork rspec


In another terminal launch specs (first green dot should appear 10 times faster the usual):

rspec --drb spec/controllers/your_controller_spec.rb


Read more: http://feeds.dzone.com/~r/dzone/snippets/~3/2FSNMSdfz98/13035