Yes to both. We’re recording calls and this works for us. 
Now we’ve been running several days without issue (since the change) and our cpu averages less than 1%.
There are tons of reports on the web of people having issues with queues and local channels. It seems like it doesn’t matter whether you have a ton of large queues with 15000 calls a day or you have 1/2 dozen queues with 10 people and hundreds of calls per day. Whatever the configuration, many are experiencing that issue.
From my experience, you can take any regular small office environment with AsteriskNOW 1.5 add a few queues with 10 static Local agents and route the the calls through them and you’ll be able to reproduce. Many won’t notice it’s going on. At first, we had once or twice a day when people would report that they had been disconnected and you might think it was a bad cell connection or something. In reality, it was Asterisk restarting. The tell-tale sign though is that you’ll have hanging dialparties.agi processes and a high cpu load.
Perhaps someone would like to file a bug report, explaining exactly what need to be done?
I think it has been reported:
https://issues.asterisk.org/view.php?id=14639
I’ve also seen other bug reports on this topic and many, many threads across several forums and mailing groups. In trying to research and identify a fix to my issue, I came across many different discussions by people having similar complaints but they don’t see all the symptoms so sometimes it’s reported differently…
For example, I believe this is the same issue:
http://www.freepbx.org/trac/ticket/3496
The first post in this thread is very similar to what we were having and it was caused by 2 separate issues that look like one. First, is the issue of Local channels as static members of a queue and the resulting instability that leads to an Asterisk restart, hung dialparties.agi, and high cpu (99%+) use. The second issue was that whenever we restarted Asterisk (either intentionally or via crash), the Local channel static members were shown in an ‘invalid’ state until we ran a ‘reload’ at the Asterisk command line. At that point the static queue members were available. So, periodically throughout the day, Asterisk would become unstable and Exit with status 139 on signal 11… and then auto restart. When it restarted, the static agents were showing status ‘invalid’ so calls would enter the queue but the agent phones wouldn’t ring until we did an Asterisk CLI ‘reload’. Afterward, I’d hear reports that earlier in the day people were disconnected and I’d pull up FreePBX to see a red-line for CPU and ssh would show hung dialparties.agi.
We have a real-time monitor app kind of like the FOP and when this happened, you’d see all the agents go red all at one time. If it wasn’t for that second bug we might have gone quite awhile and not known if the issue was with our carrier (T1 dropping out periodically) or what.