You’re testing a query, and you’re just not getting the same performance between the development and production servers.
There’s a huge list of common things that might be causing it:
Parameter sniffing Different database-level settings like compatibility levels and cardinality estimators Different server-level settings like CTFP and MAXDOP Different hardware capabilities, like different numbers of cores available, memory grant sizes available, or TempDB speeds Different indexes or statistics on the two databases Different contents of the statistics or indexes, different sampling rates Different activity happening on the two servers, like blocking
And a whole list of esoteric issues, too.