I was working on a data warehousing project where a fair number of files could be COPY'd more or less directly into tables. I have a somewhat nice machine to work with, and I ran on 75% of the cores I have (75% of 32 is 24).
Performance was pretty bad. With 24 processes going, each backend (in COPY) spent 98% of it's time in semop (as identified by strace). I tried larger and smaller shared buffers, all sorts of other tweaks, until I tried reducing the number of concurrent processes from 24 to 4.
Disk I/O went up (on average) at least 10X and strace reports that the top system calls are write (61%), recvfrom (25%), and lseek (14%) - pretty reasonable IMO.
Given that each COPY is into it's own, newly-made table with no indices or foreign keys, etc, I would have expected the interaction among the backends to be minimal, but that doesn't appear to be the case. What is the likely cause of the semops?
I'd guess it's lock contention on WALInsertLock. That means, the system is experiencing lock contention on generating WAL records for the insertions. If that theory is correct, you ought to get a big gain if you have wal_level=minimal, and you create or truncate the table in the same transaction with the COPY. That allows the system to skip WAL-logging the COPY.
wal_level doesn't exist for 8.4, but I have archive_mode = "off" and I am creating the table in the same transaction as the COPY.
Or you could upgrade to 9.2. The WAL-logging of bulk COPY was optimized in 9.2, it should help precisely the scenario you're facing.