I've followed the installation and setup procedure to the letter. The parallel:create task successfully detects 4 cores, and builds 4 test databases. parallel:prepare runs without a hitch. I see a dramatic improvement in the runtime of my cucumber features, and my system monitor shows all 4 cores chewing away at the tests. However, when I run the specs with "rake parallel:spec", or "parallel_spec" the tests consistently run in slightly more time than it takes to run them sequentially (ie. "rake spec"). Additionally, the system monitor shows all 4 cores fire up during the initialization of the specs, but only 1 core is active while the tests are actually running. Although 4 processes are created, according to the output "4 processes for 41 specs, ~ 10 specs per process", it appears as if these processes are then run sequentially, rather than in parallel. I see the rspec summary output for the first process before the second process begins. I haven't been able to find other posts about this issue, which makes me suspect that I've somehow messed up the configuration, but I have not been able to find the problem. Any thoughts?
Thank you.