I modified the test program shipped in the boost::iostreams to decompress a 1.5 GB file which expand to 6GB. The program exits after writing 900KB of data without throwing exceptions. It is reproduced below, I was told in the irc channel that this was a bug in alloc and will be probably fixed in 1.34.1. -r #include <fstream> #include <iostream> #include <boost/iostreams/filtering_stream.hpp> #include <boost/iostreams/copy.hpp> #include <boost/iostreams/filter/bzip2.hpp> using namespace std; namespace bio = boost::iostreams; int main ( int argc, char ** argv ) { if (argc < 2) { fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s data_filename\n", argv[0]); exit(0); } ifstream file(argv[1], ios_base::in|ios_base::binary ); if ( !file.good() ) { fprintf(stderr, "Unable to open file%s\n", argv[1]); exit(0); } else { try { bio::filtering_stream < bio::input > in; in.push( bio::bzip2_decompressor () ); in.push( file ); bio::copy ( in, cout ); } catch ( const std::exception& e ) { std::cerr<<"\nCaught std::exception " << ": "<< e.what() << std::endl; } } }