That's clearly part of the answer: running 1.9.2-p180-patched instead of 1.9.2-p180 drops the total test suite time from 65s down to 52s.

But the test suite still takes 52s, of which only 12s is actually attributable to tests (since rails actually outputs the times for the test portion). FWIW, all of that measured test time seems to be for bcrypt (even with the test-specific initializer to make it faster) rather than persistence anyway.

Thanks for reducing things by 13s, at least. ;-)

EDIT: Actually, it looks like I'm down to 30--40s now, so that helped a lot. Basically, all of the non-test-time seems to be rails environment time (e.g., time bundle exec rake environment) which takes about 6-7s per run (times 3).