Actually, the high sys time was probably from the lsof. I should have had that run prior to vmstat, so it didn't get counted on the vmstat output.
The grep on /var/messages completed too quick to really catch much. That said, your SYS time is a little high, especially after it finished. For an 8 core box, only 12.5% would mean one core dedicated to the task, and it rose from 4 to 16. Given that it was counted as sys and not user, and generated little I/O, indicates it might be slow memory processing on the cache.
