SLOW vrestore

All, I'm vrestore'ing about 150GBytes of data.
The vdump procedure, from the same make and
capacity drive to the same SDLT2 tapedrive on
the same machine, took about 3 hours.
The vrestore has so far been running for 24 hours
and is only halfway done.
Judging from the vrestore listing, the thing
that is slowing it down is the recovery of large
numbers of very small files.
I cant believe that it took this long to generate
the files in the first place, so why is the
resoration process so slow, and what can I
do to avoid this in the future?

Cheers,
Terry.