Tell me about it! I am in a project right now where we are required to run BDD tests (Cucumber) which hit real servers (no, mocks won't do it). Worse thing is, the 3rd party "ESB" we are using takes forever to shutdown and startup... and is being restarted a lot in the tests (someone else is doing the BDD tests as an "acceptance criteria").

The result? running the complete BDD test suite takes about 5 hours, which must be checked for every commit.