Hi all - we have some unit tests using Pact via FFI for contract verification and I'm trying to improve their performance. The Application is in C++ and we run the tests via GTest. We use an updated fork of Pact's C++ client which uses FFI under the hood. Each test does the following - 1. Creates a provider instance 2. Instantiates a custom plugin 3. Performs verification Rust is not my area of expertise, so apologies if this isn't correct but it looks to me like each call to pactffi_using_plugin will block the client thread for at least 0.5s, so each of our unit tests is taking at least that long to complete.

let result = RUNTIME.block_on(async {
          let result = load_plugin(&dependency).await;

          // Add a small delay to let asynchronous tasks to complete
          sleep(Duration::from_millis(500)).await;

          result
        });

I've tried using a fixture to make the plugin and provider instance persistent across multiple tests, but haven't had much luck (it looks like there's some state not being cleaned up between unit test runs - or maybe ths issue is with our plugin?) - the first test passes but subsequent ones fail due to contract verification failures. I can probably provide a minimal example but I thought I'd ask first in case you had any ideas. Many thanks!

Is this a provider verification task we are talking about here, or on the consumer side?

pactffi_using_plugin

needs to start the plugin, wait for it to start up and report back its running port before it can move on.

pactffi_using_plugin

is called on the consumer side, for the provider side, it is read from the pact itself and I don’t think it will call that function. Looking at the history, it was added in to fix a race condition https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-reference/commit/213d1459c578662532e64ec7a1b1ce9af15cb676 and then again the code was subsequently updated https://github.com/pact-foundation/pact-reference/commit/d41e2440a8d5011e51a90eeb44dcaa7dbe448b0d

Hi - thanks for the rapid response. It's consumer side. I'll put together an example using one of the example plugins.

Ahh I believe you should be creating a new pact handle each time, this is how you can support parallel running tests. Pact will handle merging pacts, and file locks on the resultant pacts

Thanks - I'll maybe just try removing that delay. If it works I'll add a PR to make it a parameter.

that sounds like a decent path forward chap, best of luck!

I've submitted a PR - a quick test with a delay of

0

worked fine for me (and reduced my test suite runtime from 3 minutes to 18s).