bitcoind with Testnet3 suddenly becomes unresponsive

[nxsp]

I have been running bitcoind with the testnet3 for months without any issue, but for the last 2 days, it becomes unresponsive, it eats up 100% of the cpu on the machine and I cannot get it to respond to "bitcoin-cli --tesnet" commands

I have noticed that this correlates with a surge in the number of blocks files that I have, somehow they increased by 30+% in the last 2 days:

134213159 Feb 26 16:31 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00000.dat
134214875 Feb 26 17:00 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00001.dat
134214893 Feb 26 17:30 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00002.dat
133799438 Feb 26 17:50 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00003.dat
134176875 Feb 26 18:15 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00004.dat
134073126 Feb 26 18:44 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00005.dat
134077411 Feb 26 19:15 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00006.dat
134214163 Feb 26 19:47 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00007.dat
134208853 Feb 26 20:14 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00008.dat
134097235 Feb 26 20:41 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00009.dat
134216751 Feb 26 21:19 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00010.dat
134217554 Apr 14 03:41 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00011.dat
134109523 Jun  1 16:05 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00012.dat
134208896 Jun 16 04:06 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00013.dat
133848104 Jun 27 01:28 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00014.dat
134116283 Jul 10 00:19 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00015.dat
134208316 Jul 24 13:01 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00016.dat
133703248 Aug 21 17:25 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00017.dat
133554908 Aug 22 03:32 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00018.dat
133695463 Aug 22 07:23 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00019.dat
133723065 Aug 22 10:41 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00020.dat
134063964 Aug 22 21:41 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00021.dat
133486808 Aug 23 01:26 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00022.dat
133536681 Aug 23 06:12 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00023.dat
134216219 Aug 23 23:30 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00024.dat
 16777216 Aug 23 23:30 .bitcoin/testnet3/blocks/blk00025.dat

I am not sure how to interpret that and how to solve this issue.