Enabling and Disabling Heavy File Sync Mode for Home Folders

You can enable Amazon Simple Storage Service Home Folders options for your organization. When you enable Amazon S3 Home Folders for an AppStream 2.0 stack, users of the stack can access a persistent storage folder during their application streaming sessions. No further configuration is required for your users to access their home folder. Data stored by users in their home folder is automatically backed up to an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS account, and is made available to those users in subsequent sessions. For more information, see Enable and Administer Home Folders for Your AppStream 2.0 Users.

To ensure a smooth experience and address some existing limitations, where an inconsistent file sync might be observed when users save large text files from their streaming instances to their Home Folders, AppStream 2.0 administrators can turn on the heavy_sync configuration option if large file uploads to Amazon S3 is a common user scenario while using AppStream 2.0. Turning on this option means that it might add some latency to the home folder file sync process, but completeness of all syncs to Amazon S3 is guaranteed.

This feature is available on all Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, and Linux AppStream 2.0 images that use a Linux AppStream 2.0 agent released on or after September 12, 2024.

The heavy sync feature is disabled by default for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Amazon Linux streaming sessions. To configure heavy sync permission for your users on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Amazon Linux image builder, create /etc/appstream/appstream.conf and add the following contents:

[storage]
heavy_sync = 1