Maybe i can provide a datapoint on this matter.
I've been using pgavd from over at gborg (Shridhar Daithankar's (i
think?) code) in production for some months now. I love it.
I was some hazzle to get it up, but once installed everything is smooth
and nice.
The vacuum + analyze seems to affect my system in an only postive way:
1) Everything seems snappier.
2) Weekly vacuum full is faster now.
3) The updates on a table with counters is updated faster nowadays.
4) pgavd is totally automatic, so just install it and run it.
Well i just wanted to say that i don't care if it's an external/client
process, it makes a huge differance to us lazy sob's that always forgets
to vacuum all the time.
It's even better that it's using pgstats to determine when to run
vacuum, so after big inserts it gets vacuumed promptly.
Magnus