COPY with high # of clients, partitioned table locking issues?

Just some information on our setup:

- HP DL585 G6 
- 4 x AMD Opteron 8435 (24 cores)
- 256GB RAM
- 2 FusionIO 640GB PCI-SSD (RAID0)
- dual 10GB ethernet.

- we have several tables that we store calculated values in.
- these are inserted by a compute farm that calculates the results and stores them into a partitioned schema (schema
listedbelow)
 
- whenever we do a lot of inserts we seem to get exclusive locks.

Is there something we can do to improve the performance around locking when doing a lot of parallel inserts with COPY
into? We are not IO bound, what happens is that the copies start to slow down and continue to come in and cause the
clientto swap, we had hit over 800+ COPYS were in a waiting state, which forced us to start paging heavily creating an
issue. If we can figure out the locking issue the copys should clear faster requiring less memory in use.
 

[ 2011-03-30 15:54:55.886 EDT ] 14405 [local] asgprod:4d938288.3845 LOG:  process 14405 still waiting for ExclusiveLock
onextension of relation 470273 of database 16384 after 5001.894 ms
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:55.886 EDT ] 14405 [local] asgprod:4d938288.3845 CONTEXT:  COPY reportvalues_part_1931, line 1:
"660250     41977959        11917   584573.43642105709"
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:55.886 EDT ] 14405 [local] asgprod:4d938288.3845 STATEMENT:  COPY reportvalues_part_1931 FROM stdin
USINGDELIMITERS '       '
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:56.015 EDT ] 7294 [local] asgprod:4d938939.1c7e LOG:  process 7294 still waiting for ExclusiveLock
onextension of relation 470606 of database 16384 after 5062.968 ms
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:56.015 EDT ] 7294 [local] asgprod:4d938939.1c7e CONTEXT:  COPY reportvalues_part_1932, line 158:
"660729    41998839        887     45000.0"
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:56.015 EDT ] 7294 [local] asgprod:4d938939.1c7e STATEMENT:  COPY reportvalues_part_1932 FROM stdin
USINGDELIMITERS '        '
 
[ 2011-03-30 15:54:56.077 EDT ] 25781 [local] asgprod:4d938556.64b5 LOG:  process 25781 still waiting for ExclusiveLock
onextension of relation 470606 of database 16384 after 5124.463 ms
 

relation      |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
93/677526         | 14354 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          | 1047/4
          | 27451 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
724/58891         | 20721 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 transactionid |          |          |      |       |            |      94673393 |         |       |          |
110/502566        |  1506 | ExclusiveLock            | t
 
 virtualxid    |          |          |      |       | 975/92     |               |         |       |          | 975/92
          | 25751 | ExclusiveLock            | t
 
 extend        |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
672/102043        | 20669 | ExclusiveLock            | f
 
 extend        |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          | 1178/10
          |  6074 | ExclusiveLock            | f
 
 virtualxid    |          |          |      |       | 37/889225  |               |         |       |          |
37/889225         |  4623 | ExclusiveLock            | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   405725 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
39/822056         | 32502 | AccessShareLock          | t
 
 transactionid |          |          |      |       |            |      94673831 |         |       |          | 917/278
          | 23134 | ExclusiveLock            | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470609 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
537/157021        | 11863 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470609 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
532/91114         |  7282 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 virtualxid    |          |          |      |       | 920/8      |               |         |       |          | 920/8
          | 23137 | ExclusiveLock            | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   425555 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
39/822056         | 32502 | AccessShareLock          | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          | 915/10
          | 22619 | RowExclusiveLock         | t
 
 relation      |    16384 |   470606 |      |       |            |               |         |       |          |
344/387563        | 30343 | RowExclusiveLock         | tNumber of child tables: 406 (Use \d+ to list them.)
 


riskresults=# \d reportvalues_part_1932;
    Table "public.reportvalues_part_1932"
    Column    |       Type       | Modifiers
--------------+------------------+-----------
 reportid     | integer          | not null
 scenarioid   | integer          | not null
 instrumentid | integer          | not null
 value        | double precision |
Indexes:
    "reportvalues_part_1932_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (reportid, scenarioid, instrumentid)
Inherits: reportvalues_part

riskresults=# \d reportvalues_part;
      Table "public.reportvalues_part"
    Column    |       Type       | Modifiers
--------------+------------------+-----------
 reportid     | integer          | not null
 scenarioid   | integer          | not null
 instrumentid | integer          | not null
 value        | double precision |
Indexes:
    "reportvalues_part_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (reportid, scenarioid, instrumentid)
Number of child tables: 406 (Use \d+ to list them.)

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