Temporary File Persistent Path Workaround Should Be Removed

[dficker]

Expected behavior

• This section of this page: https://docs.pantheon.io/guides/filesystem/tmp#persistent-temporary-path-workaround
• This is always a bad idea and will often bring a site down in dramatic fashion sooner or later.

Actual behavior

• It needs to be removed and/or has to have have the most dire message ever. Something like, "If you do this, your site will probably go down. Don't do this!"

Steps to reproduce the problem

1. Doing this causes the file system to fill up with temporary files, and sooner or later things will break. The Pantheon file system is not designed for storage of temporary files.

Suggested Resolution

Additional information

[rachelwhitton]

@rachelwhitton to work with @djschaap to review and confirm the culprit is over populated files dir

"dir that's being set as tmp is not being treated as a tmp folder" it would be best if we recommended a path that the platform treated as tmp and auto cleaned up

[djschaap]

This isn't necessarily related to an over-populated files directory (a dir that contains "too many" files) - but it could be related, sometimes.

The focus on temporary files suggests this is more of a rapid write situation - which is a separate issue.

I do agree this workaround is something we shouldn't be recommending, in general, due to the potential for it to create other (disastrous) problems down the road.

[rachelwhitton]

Continued discussion internally here in this slack thread, resulting todo is to add a disclaimer into the recommendation saying "this is dangerous and may take down your site if the offending plugin is very active writing to the temporary files"

[rachelwhitton]

Re-opened based on recent discussion in docs channel, where it was decided we would remove the general workaround and opt to instead audit the list of modules/plugins and only recommend it in those cases with an up to date description of why it's required and any considerations.

Next steps - @rachelwhitton to work with @lcatlett on that list of impacted extensions, and also discuss the current delivery / distribution strategy for these fixes