If `runtime_dir` is not set, gitaly will use `/tmp` as a place for sockets and packed binaries like `git2go`. If the gitlab instance does not experience much traffic and gitlay is not restarted regularly, systemd-tmpfiles will remove the binaries. This breaks some gitlab functionality until gitaly is restarted manually.
*** NixOS *** NixOS is a Linux distribution based on the purely functional package management system Nix. More information can be found at https://nixos.org/nixos and in the manual in doc/manual.