We need a lot more details about the tests you did, e.g., the equations being solved and which solvers were used.
In fact, using the solution from a direct solve (backslash) in an iterative solver takes about 10 times longer than the direct solve did.
That sounds like a symptom of ill-conditioning. There are many non-unique solutions to your equations (or approximately so), so the iterative solver spends its time crawling along a locus of nearly equivalent solutions, unable to decide between them until some stopping criterion is finally met.
