Moises,
I've not reviewed in depth the MITAB driver, but reading from a .tab
file may require random access, and it is thus not surprising that
reading from a compressed file may exhibit poor performance. You might
try to set the VSI_CACHE config option / env variable to YES, but no
guarantee
I confirm that the structure of the TAB dataset uses 512 bytes data
blocks organized in a tree structure, so reading from the file implies
lots of random access over the whole file even if you read the features
sequentially since a single feature is stored in multiple data blocks of
various typ