Is using the linux sync command able to provide a consistent view of an EFS volume?

Question

EFS (and NFS) have "close to open consistency" so two clients may not have the same view of the same file system. If I issue a linux sync command from a connected EC2 or Fargate container will this cause the client to refresh it's view of the content of the filesystem? Will it cause other connected clients to also see a consistent view?

Assuming the approach works, are there drawbacks to using sync especially when multiple clients are connected to the volume and may be reading and writing files at the time the command is issued?

Assuming the approach works, are there drawbacks to using `sync` especially when multiple clients are connected to the volume and may be reading and writing files at the time the command is issued?

Answer

Have you tried specifying noac as a mount option to force un-cached writes of file attributes, depending on your application this may be simpler to implement than forcing a sync.

This will however likely impact performance.

Is using the linux sync command able to provide a consistent view of an EFS volume?

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