Does 30% difference above count as significant?No. It's Linux, we can look at the sources: there is no per-fd cache, the page cache is global. Thus fsync() syncs the whole cache to disk.
A problem could only occur if the file cache is not global - perhaps a per-node file cache on NUMA systems - IRIX on an Origin 2000 cluster or something similar.
But as I read the unix spec, fsync is guaranteed to sync all data to disk:
Draft 6 of the posix-200x spec:
SIO If _POSIX_SYNCHRONIZED_IO is defined, the fsync( ) function shall force all currently queued I/O operations associated with the file indicated by file descriptor fildes to the synchronized I/O completion state. All I/O operations shall be completed as defined for synchronized I/O file integrity completion.
"All I/O operations associated with the file", not all operations associated with the file descriptor.
-- Manfred
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