Base station (BS) sleeping is an effective way to improve the energy-efficiency of cellular networks. However, it may bring extra user-perceived delay. We conduct a theoretical study into the impact of BS sleeping on both energy-efficiency and user-perceived delay. We consider hysteresis sleep and three typical wake-up schemes, namely single sleep, multiple sleep, and $N$ -limited schemes. We model the system as an $M/G/1$ vacation queue, which captures the setup time, the mode-changing cost, as well as the counting or detection cost during the sleep mode. Closed-form expressions for the average power and the Laplace–Stieltjes transform of delay distribution are obtained. The impacts of system parameters on these expressions are analyzed. We then formulate an optimization problem to design delay-constrained energy-optimal BS sleeping policies. We show that the optimal solutions possess a special structure, thereby allowing us to obtain them explicitly or numerically by simple bisection search. In addition, the relationship between the optimal power consumption and the mean delay constraint is analyzed, so as to answer the fundamental question: how much energy can be saved by trading off a certain amount of delay? It is shown that this optimal relationship is linear only when the delay constraint is lower than a threshold. Numerical studies are also conducted, where the impact of detection or counting cost during the sleep mode is explored, and the delay distribution under the optimal policy is obtained.