Functional tests performance In Drupal 8, I am creating functional tests extending the BrowserTestBase class.

Launching a test though (even an empty one) requires about 2-3 minutes.

Is this normal, is it there a way to speed up the functional tests?
Do not use standard (as you said in a comment).

Use testing and then create only what you need in the test. That's the main thing to speed up your tests.

They are still rather slow, but that should help.

Another thing to consider is to avoid having many test methods. Each runs in a completely new, isolated environment. A trick that is often used is to have a single testAll() method and many doTestSomething() methods, then they are faster by almost factor count(test methods), since set up is usually by far the slowest part.

You can also run tests in parallel with --concurrency 8 (nummber of cpus is a pretty good value for concurrency)