They could very well just be temp files, I know the Go standard library will write large multi-part file uploads to temp disk, for example.

It'd be better to totally stream it of course, but that's not always an option for one reason or another.

They're deleted by default every 24 hours and that time is configurable. Not useful when you get 60 requests per second though.

> They're deleted by default every 24 hours

Hm, so it's a cache then? Requesting the same tarball 100 times shouldn't create 100 zip files if they're cached, and if they aren't cached they shouldn't fill up the disk.

They are a cache, but you can generate them for each branch, tag, and commit in at least three different formats... Now imagine you have a repo with several thousand commits.

Yeah, fair point. Although I think the only uniqueness is commits here, tarballs generated from branches and tags are ultimately the same as the ones generated by the commit that those reference. But I still agree with your overall point.