Checking site performance on remote vs. locally
a: Make your settings the same as your production system.

b: Performance measurements are only meaningful if you compare apples to apples. Your test environment needs to match your production environment - same cpus, same ram, same everything. A dev workstation rarely performs the same way as a web server. It's better to have a duplicate of your production system to use for testing / staging. i.e. if you were using amazon, you'd want second ec2 instance that matches your production system.