I've had good experience with 2GB heap dumps. Actually dumping it was, in my experience, pretty quick. It was essentially as fast as the machine could do that much sequential IO. You get a lot more detail, like what was in those Strings that took up the whole heap. That is usually invaluable for diagnosing what's really wrong.

Actually analyzing a multi-GB heap dump takes 2-3x as much heap for the analyzer. The jhat tool that ships with the JVM is perfectly capable of analyzing a 2 GB heap if it has 6 GB of its own heap to play with.