cost-based vacuum

I am beginning to look at Postgres 8, and am particularly
interested in cost-based vacuum/analyze.  I'm hoping someone
can shed some light on the behavior I am seeing.

Suppose there are three threads:

writer_thread
  every 1/15 second do
    BEGIN TRANSACTION
      COPY table1 FROM stdin
      ...
      COPY tableN FROM stdin
      perform several UPDATEs, DELETEs and INSERTs
    COMMIT

reader_thread
  every 1/15 second do
    BEGIN TRANSACTION
      SELECT FROM table1 ...
      ...
      SELECT FROM tableN ...
    COMMIT

analyze_thread
  every 5 minutes do
    ANALYZE table1
    ...
    ANALYZE tableN


Now, Postgres 8.0.3 out-of-the-box (all default configs) on a
particular piece of hardware runs the Postgres connection for
writer_thread at about 15% CPU (meaningless, I know, but for
comparison) and runs the Postgres connection for reader_thread
at about 30% CPU.  Latency for reader_thread seeing updates
from writer_thread is well under 1/15s.  Impact of
analyze_thread is negligible.

If I make the single configuration change of setting
vacuum_cost_delay=1000, each iteration in analyze_thread takes
much longer, of course.  But what I also see is that the CPU
usage of the connections for writer_thread and reader_thread
spike up to well over 80% each (this is a dualie) and latency
drops to 8-10s, during the ANALYZEs.

I don't understand why this would be.  I don't think there
are any lock issues, and I don't see any obvious I/O issues.
Am I missing something?  Is there any way to get some
insight into what those connections are doing?

Thanks,

    --Ian