That's an interesting theory. It does not really fit with what I think is the problem. Currently, we do multi-threaded feed updates to avoid situations where the feed update is prolonged unnecessarily for a site that has a slow response time. I suspect that the reason for the reboots is that gPodder opens so many threads that the watchdog process starves and does not get CPU time until the timer runs out.

I have some ideas for how to improve/fix that, but currently lack the required free time, so stay tuned. For now, the "update single feed" button is what you want to workaround that problem.