> Are you saying that I should be able to issue multiple COPY commands > because my I/O wait is low? I was under the impression that I am I/O > bound, so multiple simeoultaneous loads would have a detrimental > effect ... The reason I asked how many CPUs was to make sense of the 12% usr CPU time in the above. That means you are CPU bound and are fully using one CPU. So you aren't being limited by the I/O in this case, it's the CPU. I agree with Merlin that you can speed things up by breaking the file up. Alternately you can use the OSS Bizgres java loader, which lets you specify the number of I/O threads with the "-n" option on a single file.
Thanks, I'll try that on Monday.
The other thing to wonder about though is why you are so CPU bound at 5 MB/s. What version of Postgres is this?
I was wondering about that as well, and the only thing that I can think of is that its the PK btree index creation on the IP4. PG 8.1.3 x86_64. I installed it via a RH rpm for their "Web Services Beta", or something like that. I know I'm a bit behind the times, but getting stuff in (and out) of my isolated lab is a bit of a pain. I'll compile up a 8.2 beta as well and see how that works out.
