Speed issues and Server requests differ in http and https

I am trying to speed up a magento 2.3 instance
While running in a https production enviroment pingdom shows 281 requests however when i run the identical dbase and instance on a development server in http it shows only 161 server requests and is 2s faster?
Both servers set up with identical LAMP
Can anyone explain as i feel this may be an indicator of why the production instance is so slow
see https://tools.pingdom.com/#5be5098901c00000
against https://tools.pingdom.com/#5be50a1372400000