I used slapcat without -l for two reasons: usually i slapcat pipiing in gzip the stdout so i can realtime gzip the ldif: slapcat -f slapd.conf | gzip > out.ldif.gz and also because on 32 bit slapcat, avoid the 2GB filsize limit on output ldif here the full command was: slapcat -f slapd.conf > fulldump.ldif However, I've retry with "-l file" on 32 bit linux and solaris (why not ?) Linux stops when reached 2GB file out; but there was a little bit of memory available and the allocation rate was similar to previous trials In Solaris, due to speed up the test I've ulimit -d 1024000, reached 2 GB file without stops itself (usually solaris continues, simply throws out additional data) then some time later: ch_malloc of 16392 bytes failed ch_malloc.c:57: failed assertion `0' Abort (core dumped) with a while/loop ps, last line was: PID RSS VSZ %MEM TIME STIME COMMAND 18246 1652488 1656144 41.1 31:23 09:22:35 slapcat this runs I've tried a db like: ldap@labsLDAP:/TEST_producer/openldap-data> du -h *.bdb 3,0M testCode.bdb 2,9G dn2id.bdb 600M entryCSN.bdb 545M entryUUID.bdb 15G id2entry.bdb 1,9M objectClass.bdb 270M testId.bdb In my trials, instead, allocation never stops :( Perhaps due to a greater DB ? Paolo