COPY slows down; is it normal?

Hi,

I am watching the progress of a COPY from a 2 megarow table. It seems to slow down almost exponentially. The database file grew at about 2 megabytes a minute in the beginning and now, 20 hours since started, it grows at 80 kilobytes a minute. The table has 7 columns of char and int types, the last column is text. The scene is a dual 400MHz i586 running RedHat 5.1 and postgres 6.3.2, as originally distributed, no patches. As far as I can tell by 'tail | strings | tail' on the database file, it is more than halfway there, but such exponential slowdown makes me anxious. Other users will have to take vacation:

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT LIB %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
14778 postgres 10 0 2840 2588 2124 R 0 98.2 1.0 1273m postgres

Last time I tried to load the same table without the last column, COPY took 4 hours and hash on one of the columns took 7.

Is there any room for improvement?

Thanks,

Gene