Very large compressed files (hundreds of GBs) may take several hours to "start" because Hashcat must first decompress the file once to build a dictionary cache (calculating keyspace and statistics). Usage & Limitations
Tip: Use this method primarily for (Bcrypt, WPA2, iTunes backup) where the GPU bottleneck is the bottleneck, not the wordlist delivery. The Pro Approach: On-the-Fly Filtering hashcat compressed wordlist