Speed up unit tests

[perlinm]

Unit tests (with ./checks/coverage_.py) currently time out with a 5 minute limit. It may be worth investigating why they take so long, and seeing whether they can be trimmed down.

[bharat-thotakura]

While this doesn't address the underlying reason for the tests' runtime, an initial 'low-hanging fruit' might be to pass the --sysmon flag to the coverage_.py check. It was added some time ago to checks-superstaq and could speed up the Python coverage checking itself (though requires Python 3.12+). In local testing, I found the time taken to run ./checks/coverage_.py once off main to be:

• Without --sysmon flag: 2m 13s 81ms
• With --sysmon flag: 1m 35s 988ms

[perlinm]

Oh nice! Is there any disadvantage to passing --sysmon? Maybe we should just have checks/coverage_.py do a version check and pass --sysmoh if python>=3.12.

[perlinm]

Also: is there any way to parallelize coverage while keeping it modular?

[bharat-thotakura]

Oh nice! Is there any disadvantage to passing --sysmon?

It was technically an experimental feature at the time of Python 3.12 with coverage, but it should be fine now if the tests are being executed as expected. There could be potential issues, or more likely, reported performance inefficiencies if you enable the branch coverage option in addition to --sysmon.

Maybe we should just have checks/coverage_.py do a version check and pass --sysmoh if python>=3.12.

checks-superstaq will automatically check the Python minor version and ignore the flag if you don't have Python 3.12+

[bharat-thotakura]

Also: is there any way to parallelize coverage while keeping it modular?

Not sure, haven't had much luck with parallelizing coverage

[perlinm]

--sysmon added to ./checks/all_.py and ./checks/coverage_.py. Thanks for the suggestion!

Looks like this reduced coverage time from 5m 1s to 3m 27s