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