df reports wrong free space for an Ext4 partition

My system is CentOS 6 x86_64 with root partition formatted as ext4. df reports around 3Gb as used space:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1              20158260   3433724  15700540  18% /

but du -sm -x / claims less than a single Gb is used actually:

[root@xxxx ~]# du -sm -x /
948     /

I wonder what is going on here. Usage numbers changed right after reboot. The filesystem claims it's clean, no errors in logs. I found this, but it did not explain a root of the problem. Should I just reformat the partition? Is there any way to track down this extra usage?

I also did the following to check that I don't have any data hidden from du by mounts on top of non-empty mountpoints:

[root@xxxx ~]# mount -o bind / /mnt/root
[root@xxxx ~]# du -sm /mnt/root/
949     /mnt/root/
[root@xxxx ~]#

No, that's not my case.

Solution 1:

The first thing I would think is that you have deleted files. Using lsof -n | grep deleted will help you. Does the output of that command shows you some files? (maybe you have a huge log file still being written). If you have files opened by a process (a syslogger or something like Apache web server) that are being written into they may be using a lot of disk space and the easies way will be restarting the process owning of those deleted files.

If there aren't any deleted files, could you paste the output of running tune2fs -l ?

Solution 2:

Force a filesystem check on next reboot. You may have unrecovered inodes that are holding data.

# touch /forcefsck  # Run as root, then reboot.

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1360204&p=9209650#post9209650