Fixing autotest

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 10:25:48 +0100

Autotest is a great tool by Ryan Davis that sits in your project folder, scans for changes to your source files, deduces which tests those changes are likely to affect, re-runs those tests (or all tests if it can't guess) and presents a results summary.

It means that every time you save or switch windows your tests run pretty much immediately showing you if there is a problem. But there is a cost.

Autotest manages this feat by constantly polling your entire project folder. Now this doesn't have much of a performance impact.. the CPU & memory usage is largely negligible on my 2.4GHz MBP with 4GB of memory. But what it does do is make my disk tick every second with the ongoing activity. And that bugs me.

Leopard offers the fsevents framework to 3rd party developers which allows applications to be notified, asynchronously, of changes to the file-system. Should mean no more polling, right? I've googled but the only reference I can find to such a plugin for Autotest is linked from here and comes up as "Service unavailable".

Does anyone else have any leads?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on fsevents

Fixing autotest