Checking site performance on remote vs. locally I had read a blog article recently describing how to set the settings on your local host to be a reasonable comparison to a remote host in order to test Drupal configurations and performance issues before pushing code up to the remote.

What settings should I change?
Is it true that the performance should be about the same if the settings are comparable?
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.