Then I assume your development workstation is an exact duplicate of a production server, and is serving a production load?

Even getting a staging environment to realistically resemble production is an incredibly difficult undertaking. Your development environment is a joke, sorry. If you're expecting it to resemble production in any way, I don't know what else to say except you're extremely confused about how a production environment actually works, or your production environment is a pathetic joke which serves a nonexistent userbase.