EFS Client Connections Metric Fluctuations

Metrics are a "point in time" measurement. The number you're seeing is true for an instant - when the measurement is taken.

My guess here (and it is a guess) is that there are times when one of your instances has disconnected (there will be timeouts, reboots, kernel updates, many things that can cause a brief disconnect) and during that time there will be one less connection to EFS; and that may be when the metric is calculated.

Similarly, an unexpected drop in a connection and a subsequent reconnection will see a situation where EFS thinks the old connection is still alive (it will timeout eventually) as well as the new connection. In that case you'll see four connections for a short period.

However: It's impossible to tell without detailed logs from the operating system and similarly detailed logs from EFS. Our support team can assist with troubleshooting the EFS side so I'd recommend that you raise a support case with them to dive deeper.

From a reliability and performance perspective I would enable detailed filesystem and network logging on your instances (temporarily) to try and determine if and why connections are dropping.