Hi -

I don't know if this will help or not, but it's something I've seen in the past. Is your tempdb configured differently between production and test? Specifically, is production configured at too low an initial setting and is forced to grow to accommodate your request? And is test configured high enough to handle it? You should look at the growth factor on the data and log files too. If it's at 8MB to start and growing by 1MB at a time, it would cause slowness while tempdb grows. I hope that your production environment is configured correctly for tempdb, but you never know and should confirm it.

Best of luck.