Python - Nose: Running Concurrent Tests

TLDR:
To enable multiprocessing with N workers,
run nose with:

$ nosetests --processes=N

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When writing tests in Python, I start with TestCase's derived from unittest.TestCase, and standard test discovery. When I need more complex test discovery/loading or output reports, I often use nose and its assortment of plugins as my test loader/runner.

One nice feature of nose is the multiprocess plugin. It allows you to run your tests suites concurrently rather than sequentially, spread across a number of worker processes. Running tests in parallel like this can potentially give you a large speedup in your test run times.

from the nose multiprocess docs:

"You can parallelize a test run across a configurable number of worker processes. While this can speed up CPU-bound test runs, it is mainly useful for IO-bound tests that spend most of their time waiting for data to arrive from someplace else and can benefit from parallelization."

Normally, you run tests from nose with:

$ nosetests

To run the same tests split across 4 processes (workers), you would just do:

$ nosetests --processes=4

Assuming your tests are properly isolated, everything should run normally, and you can benefit from a speedup on a multiprocessor machine.

However, Beware.

"Not all test suites will benefit from, or even operate correctly using, this plugin. For example, CPU-bound tests will run more slowly if you don't have multiple processors."

"But the biggest issue you will face is probably concurrency. Unless you have kept your tests as religiously pure unit tests, with no side-effects, no ordering issues, and no external dependencies, chances are you will experience odd, intermittent and unexplainable failures and errors when using this plugin. This doesn't necessarily mean the plugin is broken; it may mean that your test suite is not safe for concurrency."