Tests take a long time to run

[ianhinder]

On my machine, the LIFE test suite takes about 6 minutes to run, making it less likely that people will run them. I notice that the test cases run a lot of timesteps. If the purpose is to test for regressions, then probably only a few timesteps are needed. The resolution also doesn't need to be very high.

Would it make sense to reduce the number of timesteps, and potentially also the resolution of each test?

[ianhinder]

I've just realised that the tests are the same as the examples. In that case, the examples need to be physically realistic and interesting. Maybe the test system could change nSteps to 10 when copying params.h? Are there any cases where regressions could be introduced that are not picked up in the first 10 timesteps?