Ideally this suite should pass in under 1.0s.

I've done about all I can here without going into micro-optimizations. There are currently no tests which take even 0.1s to run, a handful of tests which take between 0.01-0.09s to run, yet a full eina_suite run somehow takes ~2.5s.

Examining libcheck, it seems like there's a hard limit here due to how check works: each test can be run in a forked process, but they are always run sequentially. This means that running each test has a fixed cost: I would speculate something like 0.03s per test case, meaning that for every ~30 tests we have, there is a minimum of 1 second in just setting up and waiting for the test to complete. This seems a bit bad for eina, being that it's artificially adding something like 2 seconds to each run, but it's even worse for elm which currently has 70ish tests and there should likely be many more added.

I think I may spend some time next week seeing how much work it would be to add parallel test runs to libcheck.

It would be too much work, abort, abort.