"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Some vmstat and oprofile investigation seems called for. Right now
>> we're just guessing about what the bottleneck is.
> vmstat -adSK 5
> ...
Looks to me like you're disk-bound (and your kernel is pretty bad at
distinguishing "idle" from "disk wait" states). Plain COPY into an
index-less table ought to be writing fairly linearly, so I'm surprised
you aren't able to get more out of the disk. Have you got WAL on
a separate spindle from the database?
regards, tom lane