A handful of soak / bench / replay / proof / eval-matrix tests dominate the
suite wall-clock (~50 tests ≈ the entire 73-min serial runtime; the other ~10k
are near-instant). Classify them so developers can run a fast lane locally.
Mechanism — central registry in conftest.py beside QUARANTINE (cost is empirical
test-infra metadata, not test semantics, so it lives in one auditable place, not
as decorators across ~24 files). Marker-only: it stamps `slow`, it NEVER skips,
so `-m slow` SELECTS the slow tests.
- SLOW_FILES (10): whole-file, where a module/session fixture carries the cost
(marking one test would just shift the fixture cost to the next requester).
- SLOW_TESTS (26 nodeids): mixed files, so the file's fast predicate/unit tests
stay in the fast lane.
- pytest_collection_modifyitems stamps `slow`; marker registered in pyproject.
912 of 10,596 tests classified (801 = test_cognition_eval_register_matrix
eval-matrix; called out in docs — honest accounting).
Lanes (Makefile + docs/testing-lanes.md):
fast: pytest -m "not quarantine and not slow"
slow: pytest -m "slow and not quarantine"
full: pytest -m "not quarantine" (unchanged — what CI runs)
CI is unaffected: smoke.yml and full-pytest.yml run `-m "not quarantine"`, which
still includes the slow tests. No CI behavior change; no test logic touched (the
change cannot alter pass/fail in the full lane — it only adds a marker).
Timings (10-core, numpy): full 73min serial / 25min -n auto; fast ~26min serial
/ 9.5min -n auto (7.7x combined). The 975s test_inner_loop_phase2 outlier was
probed (expected proof-scale work, not a bug; finding in docs). Deferred to
follow-up PRs: -n auto by default (needs xdist hermeticity — fresh-env-dict
subprocess + report.json/proposals writers race under parallel workers) and a
warm-runtime fixture for the remaining 1-15s ChatRuntime tail.
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