A remote server runs code terribley slow

Question

Hello,
I'm in an odd development situation. I write code on my local
dev server, which gets handed off to someone else's dev server that
tests it before putting it up live. I have NO direct access to the
remote servers and upload my files by emailing them over
individually with instructions on where to place them. (I warned
you it was odd).
I've written a small search page which does the following:
does a verity search, if a result is not cached then the file is
parsed then the information is cached. It sorts the results, then
displays them. It caches by serializing a struct of structs using
wddx.
On my local server this works almost instantaneously,
literally half a second for the largest "all" search, but on the
remote server it TIMES OUT! Doing searches (that run near instantly
locally) for less items takes upwards of 2 full minutes.
The error that coldfusion throws is that cffile write is
timing out. (It rewrites the cache if it finds new files in the
results).
The code is identical on both my local, and the remote
server.
I'm a little clueless as to why this is happening, and my
background has never been in coldfusion before. If anyone could
shed any light on why this is happening, or where to look to figure
out why it's happening, it would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you so much for any help you can give.

Answer 1

Kronin, you bring up a good point, and that has been the main
focus I've had so far. In my local environment I am searching
through roughly 1100 files. The Cache file i'm making comes out to
about 800KB. In the remote environment I'm only searching through
roughly 2000 files, and I am assuming that the cache is growing at
the same rate.
These aren't terribly big numbers I'm working with, even the
oldest hardware should be able to pull this off without a hitch.
Even if cffile loads it into memory first, there would surely be
1MB of memory available, and if not a swap shouldn't take long
enough to cause a time out.
Keep the ideas coming though :)