We were unintentionally hitting `gravatar.com` whenever a test that used
Poltergeist was run. This was certainly wasting their resources and
slowing down our tests even further, for no reason.
The problem occurred because asset compilation takes a long time, so
when the asset cache didn't exist and the first test ran, it would often
(randomly) time out during the generation before the actual test even
had a chance to run.
Now we check if the cache exists before the suite runs, and if not, we
manually fire a request to the root URL in order to generate it. This
should allow subsequent tests to use the cached assets.
Robert Speicher