Performance Synchronous Test Lifecycle

Synchronous Editor test scopes

Use synchronous NUnit setup and teardown for fixtures that only create transient Unity objects and perform synchronous assertions. Keep coroutine lifecycle fixtures when frame boundaries, deferred destruction, asset reloads or scene transitions are part of the subject.

UnityObjectTrackingTestBase is available from the packaged, test-only WallstopStudios.UnityHelpers.TestSupport assembly. It tracks owned transient objects, destroys them immediately in reverse order, tolerates duplicates and objects already destroyed, and refuses persistent assets in the Editor. It leaves the caller's logging policy alone. The testing guide describes assembly references and allocation controls.

Four existing fixtures retain all 106 case identities and assertions. WShowIfPropertyDrawerTests, WGroupLayoutBuilderTests and SpriteAnimationHelpersTests use an EditMode wrapper around the public tracking scope; AnimationEventHelpersTests needs no object lifecycle. Seven independent controls cover cleanup, duplicate/destroyed objects, nulls, active-scope enforcement, indexed and iterator ranges, logging policy, and persistent-asset refusal.

Local comparison

Three alternating fresh-process pairs use Unity 6000.6.7f1 Editor Mono on Windows x64. The second pair reverses arm order. Both arms include the same seven controls. Identical temporary one-time loggers print each loaded fixture's base type and module identity; the controller rejects the wrong base or missing identities. The temporary loggers are absent from the shipped fixtures. No other owned compiler, documentation build or benchmark overlaps the captures.

Fixture	Cases	Before median	After median	Paired after/before range
AnimationEventHelpersTests	4	129.643 ms	92.619 ms	0.338–0.839
WGroupLayoutBuilderTests	10	159.769 ms	140.593 ms	0.365–1.086
WShowIfPropertyDrawerTests	57	180.523 ms	115.555 ms	0.256–0.995
SpriteAnimationHelpersTests	35	109.203 ms	64.658 ms	0.503–1.002
Combined existing fixtures	106	537.912 ms	415.062 ms	0.338–0.991

The combined row is the median of each process's sum, rather than the sum of row medians. Its median difference is about 0.123 seconds. WGroup is slower in two of three pairs; one sprite-helper pair is effectively flat. The aggregate improvement is small in absolute terms and includes substantial variation between processes. All six processes pass all 113 cases, return raw exit zero and reach both stream ends without a drain stop.

Fixture duration includes lifecycle and runner work outside case bodies. These are local fixture observations, not complete editor startup times or an explanation of a different CI version's scheduling. Report slower cells and all paired ratios alongside aggregate results.

CI scope

The original Unity 2021.3.45f1 artifact for run 43290504332 / job 131435887943 contains a 57-case WShowIf fixture lasting 137.335653 seconds, while its case bodies sum to 0.168794 seconds. WGroup's ten cases occupy 23.030214 seconds versus 0.106894 seconds in bodies. A fixture already using plain NUnit also has substantial fixture/body separation, so replacing a common base alone does not establish the complete cause. That shard's wall clock is 749.9 seconds; merged NUnit duration is not a single process's elapsed time. The eight-minute CI target remains a separate acceptance criterion.

Replay

The replay archive contains the experiment and consumer controls.

The archive retains frozen C# inputs, source hashes, both instrumented fixture variants, final restore sources, controllers, complete NUnit trees and process receipts. Overlay the named arm's four fixture files onto the frozen source snapshot before replaying. Each process must pass all 113 cases, reach both stream ends without a drain stop, and load the expected bases. Preserve new replay identities and failures separately. A previous pre-test IL-postprocessor pipe failure is tracked on #343; later passes do not explain or repair it.