Problem

The presence of the PeriodicShardedIndexConsistencyChecker thread causes unintended refreshes on shards in all config server stepdown suites. Js tests that rely on a shard's metadata being stale can sporadically fail due to this thread running on stepup.

Possible Solutions

• Auditing all jstests that rely on stale shard metadata and disabling the periodic thread (this has been done before).
• Disabling the thread altogether on config server stepdown suites, and enabling it on targeted tests that test the behavior of the periodic thread.

Proven Affected Tests

• https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/jstests/sharding/cleanup_orphaned_cmd_prereload.js