I've started using spork, which is a replacement of spec_server. I've added --drb to spec.opts.netbeans so that it will run the specs against the drb server instead of instantiating the environment itself (which takes 30+ seconds). The good news is that it does indeed run them against the spork drb server, the bad news is that netbeans is still doing something very slow (presumably loading the rails env locally) before it sends it to the spork drb server. 

I've done as much debugging as I know how to (up until the point where I run into Java code). I've determined that the slowdown is somewhere in the Java code because once NbRspecMediator#initialize is called everything is very fast. 

I've attempted to debug the RspecRunner.run method in RspecRunner.java however, I've had no luck figuring out how to debug this without recompiling the entire project.