Writing to gzcon with rawConnection

I would like to encode/decode some text with deflate/gzip, but I'm 
having trouble. 

Decoding values from a rawConnection is fairly straightforward, but 
I'm having trouble encoding values and then retrieving them. 

gz_out <- gzcon(raw_out <- rawConnection(raw(0),open="wb")) 
writeLines("test",con=gz_out) 
flush(gz_out) 
rawConnectionValue(raw_out) 

Error: cannot allocate vector of size 131069.2 Gb 

raw_out <- rawConnection(raw(0),open="wb") 
writeLines("test",con=raw_out) 
rawConnectionValue(raw_out) 

[1] 74 65 73 74 0a 


Has anyone had success doing this? 

--Jamie