The out of memory as failure mode is a bit annoying...

Did you already (if necessary using cygwin on windows) try file, zcat | wc, and zcat | tar tvf - on the bad tarballs?

Usually this should be enough to pinpoint a gzip format problem, maybe already giving enough hints on how to spot your problem cases with simple perl tests like -s.

Otherwise it's the usual checking perldoc -m for module settings of interest before the final catch-all of 'use diagnostics' and adding instrumentation/warn-statements all over the place. With `zcat ...` or `tar --to-stdout zxvf TARBALL FILE` as alternatives to using PerlIO.