Speed up large Cucumber test suites

Test suites usually grow over time as more and more development time is spent on a projects. Overall run-time and performance of Cucumber suites in turn increases, too.

You can use the very same way Henning suggested for speeding up RSpec some time ago.

Put the following into features/support/deferred_garbage_collection.rb

CopyBefore do
  DeferredGarbageCollection.start
end

After do
  DeferredGarbageCollection.reconsider
end

We saw really huge improvement of overall execution time of the suites!