I think I’ve mentioned reasons for routing nodes to minimize latency. In line with that, if disk IO increases latency, they’d indeed want to batch. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’d use batching always blindly. For less busy nodes, there may be no latency improvement. And indeed, HTLC busy times may be unpredictable, but probably not completely random. Overall it can still be better for latency to use an adaptive batching strategy. Even if a batch is sometimes missed, on average latency can still be better than always batching.