There are a number of Django Signals that are on the modulestore's
SignalHandler class, such as SignalHandler.course_published. These
signals can trigger very expensive processes to occur, such as course
overview or block structures generation. Most of the time, the test
author doesn't care about these side-effects.
This commit does a few things:
* Converts the signals on SignalHandler to be instances of a new
SwitchedSignal class, that allows signal sending to be disabled.
* Creates a SignalIsolationMixin helper similar in spirit to the
CacheIsolationMixin, and adds it to the ModuleStoreIsolationMixin
(and thus to ModuleStoreTestCase and SharedModuleStoreTestCase).
* Converts our various tests to use this new mechanism. In some cases,
this means adjusting query counts downwards because they no longer
have to account for publishing listener actions.
Modulestore generated signals are now muted by default during test runs.
Calls to send() them will result in no-ops. You can choose to enable
specific signals for a given subclass of ModuleStoreTestCase or
SharedModuleStoreTestCase by specifying an ENABLED_SIGNALS class
attribute, like the following example:
from xmodule.modulestore.tests.django_utils import ModuleStoreTestCase
class MyPublishTestCase(ModuleStoreTestCase):
ENABLED_SIGNALS = ['course_published', 'pre_publish']
You should take great care when disabling signals outside of a
ModuleStoreTestCase or SharedModuleStoreTestCase, since they can leak
out into other tests. Be sure to always clean up, and never disable
signals outside of testing. Because signals are essentially process
globals, it can have a lot of unpleasant side-effects if we start
mucking around with them during live requests.
Overall, this change has cut the total test execution time for
edx-platform by a bit over a third, though we still spend a lot in
pre-test setup during our test builds.
[PERF-413]
