Rich- this is odd because the location of the error appears to occur in a place that indicates that it is trying to deserialize data. If it were only dumping the dds+das, then this code should not be invoked. In any case,looking closer, there is an error in reading that is not related to the 500mb limit. Working on it. =Dennis Heimbigner Unidata Ticket Details =================== Ticket ID: GGL-730752 Department: Support netCDF Java Priority: Normal Status: Open