libeatmydata for running tests and installing dependencies under Travis CI

[vladimir-v-diaz]

Description of issue or feature request:

The integration and unit tests take a while to run under Travis CI. Likewise, installing some of our dependencies have taken ages to complete in the past, but things have fortunately improved on this front. @trishankatdatadog has directed me to an interesting project that can potentially address some of these concerns.

libeatmydata, as in lib-eat-my-data.
https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata

Debian uses it. I notice some Python projects like Numpy use it, as well.

Current behavior:

Installing packages or running tests happen, slowly.

Expected behavior:

Dependencies are installed and unit tests run, quickly.

[vladimir-v-diaz]

@trishankatdatadog
Thanks for sharing this! The IO issues with running the integration and unit tests have always bothered me.

[trishankatdatadog]

No problem --- hope it helps!

[MVrachev]

We have made improvements with the performance of the tests #1096.

Still, if we want to optimize even more we can consider this.
What do you think @trishankatdatadog @joshuagl @lukpueh ?

[trishankatdatadog]

What do you think @trishankatdatadog @joshuagl @lukpueh ?

As long as our tests can detect failures induced by libeatmydata, this should be a harmless improvement to make. But if our tests run quickly enough now, it's probably not worthwhile, and we can close this, and revisit in the future.

[lukpueh]

+1 closing