A small, complete example of the issue

"""Example of Pandas bug."""
from numpy.random import randn
from pandas import DataFrame, read_msgpack

POWER = 6
ROWS = 10 ** POWER
COLS = 280
SIZE = ROWS * COLS
# COL_NAMES = ['Columns']

print('rows: {:,}; cols: {}; data points: {:,}; float memory (bytes): {:,}; '
      'float memory (GiB): {:.3}'.format(ROWS, COLS, SIZE, SIZE * 8,
                                         float(SIZE * 8) / 1024 / 1024 / 1024))

DTF = DataFrame(randn(ROWS, COLS))  # , columns=COL_NAMES
print(DTF)
DTF.to_msgpack('foobar_{}.msg'.format(POWER))
print('Reading exercise')
DTF2 = read_msgpack('foobar_{}.msg'.format(POWER))
print(DTF2)

Current Output

rows: 1,000,000; cols: 280; data points: 280,000,000; float memory (bytes): 2,240,000,000; float memory (GiB): 2.09
        0         1         2         3         4         5         6    \
0 -0.026045  1.102096  0.702563 -1.508039  0.308464  0.504351  2.887272   

        7        8         9      ...          270      271       272    273  \
0 -0.700034 -0.11521 -0.447198    ...    -0.566173  0.16131 -0.581333 -0.362   

        274      275       276       277       278       279  
0 -1.433336  0.60287  0.799355  0.628572  0.542312 -0.410359  

[1 rows x 280 columns]
Reading exercise
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../bug/pandas_bug6.py", line 20, in <module>
    print(DTF2.head(1))
AttributeError: 'list' object has no attribute 'head'

Expected Output

rows: 1,000,000; cols: 280; data points: 280,000,000; float memory (bytes): 2,240,000,000; float memory (GiB): 2.09
        0         1         2         3         4         5         6    \
0 -0.026045  1.102096  0.702563 -1.508039  0.308464  0.504351  2.887272   

        7        8         9      ...          270      271       272    273  \
0 -0.700034 -0.11521 -0.447198    ...    -0.566173  0.16131 -0.581333 -0.362   

        274      275       276       277       278       279  
0 -1.433336  0.60287  0.799355  0.628572  0.542312 -0.410359  

[1 rows x 280 columns]
Reading exercise
        0         1         2         3         4         5         6    \
0 -0.026045  1.102096  0.702563 -1.508039  0.308464  0.504351  2.887272   

        7        8         9      ...          270      271       272    273  \
0 -0.700034 -0.11521 -0.447198    ...    -0.566173  0.16131 -0.581333 -0.362   

        274      275       276       277       278       279  
0 -1.433336  0.60287  0.799355  0.628572  0.542312 -0.410359  

[1 rows x 280 columns]

Output of pd.show_versions()

## INSTALLED VERSIONS commit: None python: 2.7.10.final.0 python-bits: 64 OS: Darwin OS-release: 16.0.0 machine: x86_64 processor: i386 byteorder: little LC_ALL: None LANG: None pandas: 0.18.1 nose: None pip: 8.1.2 setuptools: 18.5 Cython: None numpy: 1.8.0rc1 scipy: 0.13.0b1 statsmodels: None xarray: None IPython: None sphinx: None patsy: None dateutil: 1.5 pytz: 2013.7 blosc: None bottleneck: None tables: None numexpr: None matplotlib: 1.3.1 openpyxl: None xlrd: None xlwt: None xlsxwriter: None lxml: None bs4: None html5lib: None httplib2: None apiclient: None sqlalchemy: None pymysql: None psycopg2: None jinja2: None boto: None pandas_datareader: None None

Comment From: VelizarVESSELINOV

python3 version is giving to_msgpack error using the same code:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../bug/pandas_bug6.py", line 17, in <module>
    DTF.to_msgpack('foobar_{}.msg'.format(POWER))
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pandas/core/generic.py", line 1122, in to_msgpack
    **kwargs)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pandas/io/packers.py", line 151, in to_msgpack
    writer(fh)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pandas/io/packers.py", line 147, in writer
    fh.write(pack(a, **kwargs))
OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument

Comment From: chris-b1

Thanks for the report, this is a duplicate of #12905 - the issue is that msgpack doesn't support a bytestring > 2GB. We should at minimum catch this and show a better error message.

https://github.com/msgpack/msgpack/blob/master/spec.md#formats-ext