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Can someone authoritative explain what the cookies that teststackoverflow.com wants to set are for (tracking — I know, but tracking what, and what's wrong with the regular stackoverflow.com and is teststackoverflow.com part of the Stack Exchange infrastructure, and …).

And why does it think it needs to run JavaScript?

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Go there! http://teststackoverflow.com/

We are running performance tests analyzing changes to our global network. It is not malicious, we're just collecting performance metrics as we make major changes to our infrastructure. We want to ensure performance gets better, not worse, as we make changes.

Edit: I forgot to mention the separate domain is temporary. Part of the changes we're evaluating are geo-located DNS servers, which means we need another top level domain since we have to hand off the SOA record for a 100% valid test. In the future we will continue collecting timings on 0.1% - 1% of page loads, but it will not be a separate domain or <iframe>.

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    I think part of the confusion is that 'why not test.stackoverflow.com?' and the issue with domain cookies (and not wanting to impact production cookies).
    – user213963
    Commented Feb 17, 2014 at 20:29
  • @Nick: Is it intentional that this iframe is actually visible when it's included in the page? (i.e. can it not be included, but style="display:none"?
    – Matt
    Commented Feb 21, 2014 at 1:04
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    @Matt Uh no, absolutely now. It looks like a style revision there - a deploy will add it inline in just a few minutes.
    – Nick Craver Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2014 at 1:08
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    @MichaelT part of what we're testing is alternative DNS servers, which requires the domain itself be served from another top level entity. To get a clean test, that means another SLD. Also, we needed something easy to deploy another certificate on, our main sites use a combo cert we would not let another entity have - a single test domain cert though, that's doable.
    – Nick Craver Mod
    Commented Feb 21, 2014 at 1:16

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