I'm trying to analyze heap dumps from a server which are fairly large files (10-15 GB). I create those files on the server and want to analyze them on my machine, so for downloading them, I tried compressing them with both bzip and gzip. Both programs consistently produce corrupted files that they can't decompress anymore.
I'm using ext3 with a block size of 4 KiB, so the file size limit should be 2 TiB and therefore irrelevant in my case. I'm using gzip 1.3.12 and bzip 1.0.5 on a Ubuntu Jaunty, 64-bit server edition, in a mostly vanilla state (only added some packages, nothing fancy).
There is a RAID-1 running, but it reports no synchronization problems or delays.
The dumps are created with jmap.
Is there any particular type of data that makes those programs choke?
Is the size a problem?
What could I try to find out more or circumvent the problem?
-t
flag.