jest: Incredibly slow (near unusable) on Docker container

I’ve begun using Docker containers for many of my projects and have noticed how incredibly slow Jest runs in a Docker container when executing on a shared folder on OS X. Within Docker you can mount a local path and map it to a path within the container (e.g. ~/Source/projecta:/usr/src/app). When using this configuration my tests which consists of a single file with a single unit test takes over 30 seconds; but when run locally outside of Docker it takes 1 second. I’m using the command jest specs/unit; which I got from another Jest issue suggesting that supplying the test folder could speed up tests, and it did, locally, from 3 seconds to 1 second; but made no change to how it runs in Docker. I would have left it at that and said that it’s a Docker for Mac issue (especially because there is a speed issue with mounted volumes that is known) but I ran the same exact single test using mocha and it executed in milliseconds. The unit test is a simple expect(true).toBe(true) (or for mocha+chai expect(true).to.equal(true) and for some reason Jest, under Docker, executed in ~30 seconds vs mocha’s less than 1 second.

Are there any configuration settings or optimizations that I could use to help speed up Jest? I would much rather use Jest over Mocha, but will obviously use the test platform that executes in a reasonable amount of time. This is my Jest configuration:

"jest": {
    "automock": false,
    "verbose": true,
    "testFileExtensions": [
      "js"
    ],
    "moduleFileExtensions": [
      "js",
      "json"
    ],
    "testDirectoryName": "spec/unit",
    "testPathIgnorePatterns": [
      "/node_modules/",
      "<rootDir>/lib/"
    ],
    "modulePathIgnorePatterns": [
      "/node_modules/",
      "<rootDir>/lib/"
    ]
  }

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 8 years ago
Reactions: 46
Comments: 31 (10 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I’ve investigated a bit, and it seems the source of slowness is this._crawl It crawls whole file tree from the root of project, including node_modules - and due slow fs access from docker to osxfs it takes almost 2 minutes to walk whole file tree. And for me solution was simply add "roots": ["./src"] to jest.config.js

+50

amayun on Sep 7, 2018

@amkoehler yeah, I think there’s a significant difference in the libraries that Jest and Mocha use for watching filesystem changes. I assume that Mocha is less thorough, (and/or) less active, and/or less compatible with all filesystems. The speed issue is definitely an issue with Docker for Mac as I have friends who have slightly different configurations for running Docker on a Mac that do not see as big of an issue. With that said, since Docker for Mac is the official way to run Docker instances, it would be great for the developers of Jest to consider looking into how to be a bit more compatible with it.

+14

mbrio on Jan 17, 2017

@rogeliog is this something you could potentially find someone in Docker team to fix?

+12

thymikee on Dec 21, 2017

I came to this issue lots of times when trying to figure it out why jest was slow. Somehow, in my scenario, I was able to improve the performance. I’ll just leave it here in case anyone is trying to figure it out too.

Scenario:

Building my application inside a docker container.

In my case, the container was based on Linux Alpine.

My Solution:

I changed the container base image to use Ubuntu instead of Alpine. My tests started to run faster (from 3 ~ 4 min to 40s ~ 60s).

Hope this helps someone! 😃

wmartins on Aug 19, 2017

enabling the delegated flag (eg. docker -v ${PWD}:${PWD}:delegated) can make jester considerably faster, but still not close to native. Docs about this flag at at https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/osxfs-caching/

jpbochi on Jul 13, 2018

@mbrio I decided to switch over to mocha, and the tests run immediately within my docker container without an issue. No changes were made to my Dockerfile or docker-compose configuration. This seems like a Jest issue and not a Docker issue. I had no issues with running my Jests tests locally, only within the container.

amkoehler on Jan 13, 2017

“roots”: [“./src”] not supported for create-react-app (boo!)

virasana on Dec 11, 2018

Hi @cpojer, sorry I didn’t mean to drop off like that, I did get a chance to run jest -i, I also installed native watchman and ran jest -i --watchman, neither of which sped up the processing of tests. As I mentioned in my original post I understood that there was a speed issue with Docker and mounted drives. I would like to point out that I have implemented mocha in conjunction with chokidar for watching files and still do not see the kind of slowdown I’m seeing with jest. Chokidar+mocha detects file changes in no more than 2 seconds and executed tests in under a second; jest takes over 30 seconds, sometimes up to a minute to detect a file change and executes the single test in a little over a second. Also, I’d like to note that I am not using babel-jest, I am using only the features of es6 that are available to node 6. I understand if this is something you are not looking to persue, but there does seem to be some sort of bottleneck in how jest watches files when compared to chokidar. Finally, as to your question about cores, my VM has 2 cores and 4gb of RAM.

mbrio on Aug 12, 2016

there’s a new issue to work on a docker-for-mac improvement to solve this: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/7

jpbochi on Apr 6, 2020

That’s great! #6732 landed recently and fixed the roots support, so that’s probably a viable solution for folks wanting to run things in docker now

SimenB on Sep 13, 2018

(I don’t use watch mode, I run test manually after I made some changes)

My issue is mounting the node_modules/ directory so the setup time is very long (15s) With the below change, it is around 5s

Before

    volumes:
      - .:/opt/app
      - .:/opt/app:cached # Or with cache, but still slow

After

    volumes:
      - .:/opt/app
      - /opt/app/node_modules/

cklll on Apr 7, 2020

would be useful to have a debug method for whats going on. For example I tried to figure out why my glob patterns were not improving speed until I found this issue https://github.com/facebook/jest/issues/7031 which made me realize all the files are crawled before the filter. so I added a “roots” folder and it sped up the crawling significantly.

ghost on Dec 31, 2019

@SimenB Fair enough. I only wished there was some incentive for the core team to try to reach more people. However cool jest might be, there are alternatives out there. And being super slow to run is a deal breaker.

jpbochi on Jan 28, 2019

Using the new PnP feature of Yarn enabled Jest to run fast in Docker for me. It removes the node_modules folder meaning Jest doesn’t have to crawl it.

cdomigan on Nov 1, 2018

This is a known docker for mac issue: https://forums.docker.com/t/file-access-in-mounted-volumes-extremely-slow-cpu-bound/8076/158

aaronjensen on Aug 11, 2016

@jpbochi 's mention solved for my case. using :delegated though still a lot slower than native ones, but acceptable now

sunderls on Dec 13, 2020

Linking to https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/1358

jasonwilliams on Jun 6, 2019

I feel like this is still an issue. Running a single test file was taking me 17-20 seconds in a Docker container. After some Googling, I landed on this issue. I already have a jest roots config setup, like @amayun recommended. But, using the delegated approach recommended by @jpbochi allowed me to cut the run time down to 8 seconds. However, that’s still a long time to wait for a single test to run. I hear that this is basically a Docker/Mac/Jest issue, and I get that there are Docker pieces that can’t be addressed by the Jest team. Still though, this seems like a pretty common set of technologies to develop with. And, given that Mocha seems to run quickly in a Docker container leads me to believe that there could be something tweakable on the Jest side of things.

elliotlarson on Jan 28, 2019