Factory Girl vs User.create

benchmarks.txt

phoenix:stats [master*]$ rails runner 'Benchmark.bm {|x| x.report { 1000.times { Factory.create(:user) } } }'

      user     system      total        real
  5.050000   0.890000   5.940000 (  7.895676)

phoenix:stats [master*]$ rails runner 'Benchmark.bm {|x| x.report { 1000.times { |i| User.create(:email => "me@example#{i}.com", :name => "bob", :password => "password1") } } }'

      user     system      total        real
  5.110000   0.920000   6.030000 (  8.807853)

setup.txt

ruby 1.8.7 (2011-02-18 patchlevel 334) [i686-darwin10.6.0]
Rails 3.1.0.rc1
sqlite3 (1.3.3)
factory_girl_rails (1.0.1)

user.rb

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Clearance::User

  # Used on settings screen to display a field for current password.
  attr_reader :current_password

  validates :name, :presence => true
  validates :time_zone, :presence => true

  has_many :projects
end

user_factory.rb

# All three of these attributes are required. Authentication setup by clearance. https://github.com/thoughtbot/clearance

Factory.define :user do |user|
  user.name     "Bob Smith"
  user.sequence(:email) { |n| "user#{n}@example.com" }
  user.password "password"
end

FactoryGirl is a great tool and much better then building the objects. For example when we switched the way we saved associations it just required two line changes and all our tests still passed. If we have to go over every time we built it... dear Lord. Not to mention that we are always adding new fields and validations. I'll have to give this a shot on my own project soon as it has a much more complex user model.