PCOV for code coverage
In Some ways of speeding up your tests I mentioned about using PCOV as an alternate for Xdebug for code coverage. Xdebug is fantastic, but it can be quite slow, which means when you're running your tests in a CI/CD environment, your pipelines can start to get quite slow!
Well, since then, I have actually converted all of the Shopify apps I build at work, to use PCOV instead of Xdebug and the results were just as I expected, much faster pipeline runs!
I initially tested it on the app I was working on at the time. The app had a suite of 1205 tests, which equalled 4309 assertions:
As you can see, I was running it with 2 processes and it took 57.49 seconds. This time isn't bad by any means, I've seen some test suites of a similar size take several minutes to run, however we can improve this time!
Once I'd got PCOV configured, I reran the exact same test suite with the same number of processes:
24.92 seconds?! That's a 56% speed increase! 🤯
Once this was done, I set aside some time to go through the rest of our apps and convert them to use PCOV. I would highly recommend you do the same. Especially if this is the only thing you're using Xdebug!
