I recently did a restore using the 'time' command on FreeBSD 4.8:
`time gbak -r -user...`

It came up with some interesting results:
2.188u 4.383s 1:31.51 7.1% 187+830k 0+0io 0pf+0w

2.188 seconds of 'user' time
4.383 seconds of 'system' (kernel) time

Disk was idle, host was localhost(over tcp/ip, though)
The backup was the only connection to the database.
Machine load was under 0.1 ...

There wouldn't be excess 'usleep' commands in there, would there?

Could backup/restore be sped up at all?...