Hmm... this definitely sounds like it's likely an Apple issue, but I'll keep my eye on it too. The issue being related to large file access volume would explain some of the issues being described on here recently. Possibly this is an issue related to available filehandles? SAV is friendly and gives them back right away, and it doesn't grab too many at a time, but if Apple's taking a little while to make them available to the rest of the OS after they've been released, Lion could quickly reach its filehandle limit, which would in turn cause an issue such as this (open files still work, anything depending on new open files, including caching and other OS-related functions, would freeze).
If you're up for a bit of digging, checking your "launchctl limit maxfiles" value and lsof results in terminal.app when you suspect a freeze is coming should tell you if you are using up your file handles. In launchctl, the first column is the soft limit, and the second is the hard limit, per-process. Leaving off maxfiles in the command will show you the other limits set by launchctl. ulimit -a and sysctl -a can also provide interesting information.
Usually this will leave a logfile though, so we may have to search elsewhere for the issue.
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Andrew
Threat Researcher
SophosLabs
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