I'm trying to get Thinking Sphinx to work in test mode in Rails. Basically this:

ThinkingSphinx::Test.init
ThinkingSphinx::Test.start

freezes and never comes back.

My test and devel configuration is the same for test and devel:

dry_setting: &dry_setting
  adapter: mysql
  host: localhost
  encoding: utf8
  username: rails
  password: blahblah

development:
  <<: *dry_setting
  database: proj_devel
  socket: /tmp/mysql.sock  # sphinx requires it

test:
  <<: *dry_setting
  database: proj_test
  socket: /tmp/mysql.sock  # sphinx requires it

and sphinx.yml

development:
  enable_star: 1
  min_infix_len: 2
  bin_path: /opt/local/bin

test:
  enable_star: 1
  min_infix_len: 2
  bin_path: /opt/local/bin

production:
  enable_star: 1
  min_infix_len: 2

The generated config files, config/development.sphinx.conf and config/test.sphinx.conf only differ in database names, directories and similar things; nothing functional.

Generating the index for devel goes without an issue

$ rake ts:in
(in /Users/pupeno/proj)
default config
Generating Configuration to /Users/pupeno/proj/config/development.sphinx.conf
Sphinx 0.9.8.1-release (r1533)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file '/Users/pupeno/proj/config/development.sphinx.conf'...
indexing index 'user_core'...
collected 7 docs, 0.0 MB
collected 0 attr values
sorted 0.0 Mvalues, 100.0% done
sorted 0.0 Mhits, 99.8% done
total 7 docs, 422 bytes
total 0.098 sec, 4320.80 bytes/sec, 71.67 docs/sec
indexing index 'user_delta'...
collected 0 docs, 0.0 MB
collected 0 attr values
sorted 0.0 Mvalues, nan% done
total 0 docs, 0 bytes
total 0.010 sec, 0.00 bytes/sec, 0.00 docs/sec
distributed index 'user' can not be directly indexed; skipping.

but when I try to do it for test it freezes:

$ RAILS_ENV=test rake ts:in
(in /Users/pupeno/proj)
DEPRECATION WARNING: require "activeresource" is deprecated and will be removed in Rails 3. Use require "active_resource" instead.. (called from /Users/pupeno/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p249/gems/activeresource-2.3.5/lib/activeresource.rb:2)
default config
Generating Configuration to /Users/pupeno/proj/config/test.sphinx.conf
Sphinx 0.9.8.1-release (r1533)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file '/Users/pupeno/proj/config/test.sphinx.conf'...
indexing index 'user_core'...

It's been there for more than 10 minutes, the user table has 4 records.

The database directory look quite diferently, but I don't know what to make of it:

$ ls -l db/sphinx/development/
total 96
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff   196 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.spa
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  4982 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.spd
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff   417 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.sph
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  3067 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.spi
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff    84 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.spm
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  6832 Mar 11 18:10 user_core.spp
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff     0 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.spa
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff     1 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.spd
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff   417 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.sph
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff     1 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.spi
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff     0 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.spm
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff     1 Mar 11 18:10 user_delta.spp

$ ls -l db/sphinx/test/       
total 0
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  0 Mar 11 18:11 user_core.spl
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  0 Mar 11 18:11 user_core.tmp0
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  0 Mar 11 18:11 user_core.tmp1
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  0 Mar 11 18:11 user_core.tmp2
-rw-r--r--  1 pupeno  staff  0 Mar 11 18:11 user_core.tmp7

Nothing gets added to a log when this happens. Any ideas where to go from here?

I can run the command line manually:

/opt/local/bin/indexer --config config/test.sphinx.conf --all

which generates the output as the rake ts:in, so no help there.