A lot has been written here about slow development in general and slow testing in particular e. g.:
For my use case I found one reason for slow testing while playing with the Developer Console: Default log-levels are in most tools something like FINE. This may cause very huge log-files and in my case very slow response times (about 2 minutes). Setting the log-levels to ERROR or WARN reduced the waiting-time from 2 minutes to 3 seconds. WOW! That's what I wanted ;-)
Trying to apply what I have just learned to my preferred tools I opened eclipse. But as an unfortunate there in the Force.com IDE it always creates verbose FINE-like logs, even after picking the lowest level for all Log-Categories in the slider... I tried it with v31 on eclipse-4.4 and also v29 on eclipse-4.3. Both nearly the same and it still wastes ~2 minutes for logs I don't need. Something I'm doing wrong here.
Has anyone an idea on how to get rid of this bloated logs in eclipse?