[whatUwant]

Just now I noticed that if there is a huge archive (for example a zip archive containing hundreds of thousands of files), Kodi will practically halt during the process of opening the folder (not the archive itself).
I suspect it's OS independent. Feel free to move this post to Android forum if it's indeed an Android-only issue.

Here is what happened:

1. Before updating the firmware of my TV, I was making a backup of Kodi media library. The destination of backup was set to a library folder (in this case let's say it's smb://192.168.1.1/files).
   
2. After the firmware update completed, I did a factory reset and reinstalled Kodi. 
   
3. When I was trying to open the same folder smb://192.168.1.1/files in Kodi, the loading spinner simply wouldn't stop. Meanwhile I could see the outbound traffic on 192.168.1.1 significantly increased.
   
4. After a few minutes, the spinner finally disappeared and the content of the folder was shown. And the outbound traffic on 192.168.1.1 became normal again.
   
5. I removed the backup archive in folder smb://192.168.1.1/files and everything went back to normal.
   

Therefore I think Kodi must be reading the huge archive file and it made Kodi practically irresponsive.
There should be an option to disable the preload of archive files or a threshold of time beyond which the preload automatically stops.

[davilla]

or remove the hundreds of thousands of files from the zip archive

[whatUwant]

or remove the hundreds of thousands of files from the zip archive

that's the confusing part.
i was merely trying to browse the folder, not the archive itself. that's why it took me a while to realize what went wrong.