Thank you all for your pointers and instructions!
I only have 2GB of memory available, and after adding another service things seemed a bit sluggish. That prompted me to look into maintenance and better understand why the users.v3j file grows the way it does.
Following Dirk's advice, here are the results:
[code]
exported users to /spider/local_data/user_json - 266977 Users, 0 Deleted
(0 empty & too old, 0 ancient, 0 nodes, 0 spurious), 0 renamed,
0 Unlocked, 0 Errors in 9373 mS
perl user_json CREATING /spider/local_data/users.v3j
(*) DXUser finished
There are 266977 user records and 0 errors in 9644 mS
[/code]
The file has shrunk from 100MB+ down to just 68MB. Node is back up and running fine.
Thanks again — 73 de PA0ESH