Re: leaking lots of unreferenced inodes (pg_xlog files?), maybe after moving tables and indexes to tablespace on different volume

Palle Girgensohn <girgen@FreeBSD.org> writes:
> ... I got lots of space freed
> up, but it seems that after that the disk usage grows linearly (it seems
> to leave many inodes unreferenced).

Hm.  We've seen issues in the past with PG processes failing to close
no-longer-useful files promptly, but ...

> Strange thing is I cannot find any open files.

... that suggests there's something else going on.

> The unreferenced inodes are almost exclusively around 16 MB in size, so
> i.e. they would most probably all be pg_xlog files.

Have you got any sort of WAL archiving active, and if so maybe that's
holding onto WAL files?  Not that it's clear how come lsof wouldn't
tattle on an archiving process either.

> Stopping postgresql briefly did not help, I tried that.

That seems to point the finger at some non-postgres cause.  I confess
I can't guess what.
        regards, tom lane