There are many variables at play when it comes to dealing with performance issues. You mentioned the configuration of your production system: 32 GB RAM, 16 cores (how many physical processors, I assume 2). What is the rest of the configuration? SAN or DASD for storage, is it SCSI or fiber channel?

What are the configurations for your DEV, TEST, UAT servers?

Again, there are many things that can contribute to differences in performance between the different environments.