Speed up Travis runs

[maraoz]

Many tests take > 1 sec! Check if we can speed it up somehow.

[gitcoinbot]

Issue Status: 1. Open 2. Started 3. Submitted 4. Done

---

This issue now has a funding of 0.2 ETH (122.07 USD @ $610.35/ETH) attached to it.

• If you would like to work on this issue you can 'start work' on the Gitcoin Issue Details page.
• Questions? Checkout Gitcoin Help or the Gitcoin Slack
• $21,567.08 more funded OSS Work available on the Gitcoin Issue Explorer

I just missed out on the gitcoin bounty, but I did spend some time trying to figure this out so I may as well share my findings.

The main slow point here is with xmlhttprequest that web3 uses to make requests. For the synchronous send method it spawns a new instance of node and creates multiple temporary files to handle each request.

There was a pull request that addressed this issue several years ago here but it wasn't merged. If you apply those patches and then add the local repository as a dependency of zos-cli you should notice a significant speed increase. The duration of the tests went from 3 minutes to 45 seconds on my machine.

Hope that helps.

[itstehkman]

@a9y thanks for the input! I'm not sure it's a great idea to patch the project locally for the reason of messing with the project's dependencies. What happens when the linked web3 / truffle dependency is updated and that uses a newer node-xmlhttprequest? It would break. It might be a better idea to patch the upstream node-xmlhttprequest and get web3 to link to that, and get truffle to link to that, and update the truffle version in zos-cli, but that might be some more effort (although worth it in the end and not just for zos-cli).

What are your thoughts on that? I'd rather try and find some easy, non-dependency breaking, changes to speed up the tests that can also be a longer-term solution for the project, so your suggestion may be used as a second resort.

The patch for node-xmlhttprequest has been there for so long that I can't imagine the maintainer merging it any time soon.

The only other solution would be to get the guys at web3 to fork and maintain their own version of node-xmlhttprequest. You could reach out to them and see if they'd be willing to do it.