pytest took seconds at the “Collecting…” stage.

I had a directory with a lot of tiny files (./data_1234/) in the poetry package folder, and blamed it initially.

SO¹ told me that the syntax to ignore a folder is

[tool:pytest]
norecursedirs = subpath/*

Wildcards are nice and data*/* was the first attempt.

Nothing.

Then I without success tried this:

testpaths="tests"

After a one-hour saga, I found that the culprit was a package that I was using. The tests imported my package, which imported the slow package, and it takes seconds to do so.

‘Collecting’ seems not to be only “find test files”, but it reads them and imports them and all their dependencies.

Waiting time went back to normal as soon as I commented out importing my package from the test.