Mocha intermittent timeouts

[mleanos]

We seem to be having intermittent issues with the Mocha tests timing out; including the Travis CI builds failing due to these timeouts. This has been disrupting the flow of contributions with our PR's builds failing. Personally, when I've committed changes to a PR, I have been crossing my fingers that no tests timeout.

I suggest to implement suite level timeout increases; described here http://mochajs.org/#timeouts. This could be a permanent or temporary solution. Either way, it may save us a lot of headache when running through the CI builds.

I have a branch that I've been testing this with, and it seems to have solved the issue with timeouts. I'm setting the timeout using this.timeout(10000); for each server test suite (just once per file). It's a small change to each server test file.

I wanted to open the discussion before I submitted a PR. Perhaps there is a bigger issue at play here, rather than just latency issues. Any thoughts, or concerns over this approach?

@lirantal @ilanbiala @codydaig @rhutchison @trainerbill @simison @bastianwegge @jloveland

[codydaig]

SGTM

[lirantal]

Hi @mleanos,
As you can see, I've already used this timeout mechanism to address this issue here: https://github.com/meanjs/mean/blob/master/modules/users/tests/server/user.server.model.tests.js#L174

I'm ok with having a global one per the entire test suite as well.
I believe this is ok, and is just to address issues with CI building on environments where performance might not be the best like Travis.
You're welcome to send a PR for it.

[mleanos]

@lirantal Ok great. Because I'm currently getting frustrated since I'm testing the tests atm :)

[bastianwegge]

Shouldn't this be about creating a sandbox for every test and making sure no requests or timeouts are running after every single test-suite finished rather than just increasing the timeout?

[mleanos]

@bastianwegge Can provide an example, or proposed alternative solution?

I realize that my proposal may be just a temp solution. Right now, these timeouts are reaking havoc on the Travis builds, so it would be nice to get something out quickly.

[lirantal]

"testing the tests" - that's nice :)