Yes, thumb. As for your case - I suspect that the problem is with large number of small files, more than a size of those files. Swap-related settings may be tuned for effective "burst" handling of things (which tends to "froze" device, though", or for handling everything in small chunks - little slower, but is more multitasking-friendly (watchdog is a kind of additional task too, mind you).

Also, CPU power may have something to do with it, too - I'm using 900 mhz as max, "since always". Your description about hot device seems to indicate that CPU is very busy handling I/O, which is strange - in all cases I've described (packing, unpacking, big files or many small files) my CPU is quite busy, but not extremely (nothing like 100% usage). Maybe you or pichlo are limiting speed lower than 900 mhz, and it gets choked at 100%?

/Estel

// edit

I still doesn't feel right that we're hijacking ModRana thread for this (even if it is remotely related to ModRana, i.e. to batch files handling).