At some point, my Joomla system running on my local WAMP became incredibly slow. It was taking 30-60 seconds to load a page that only takes a few seconds to load on my cloud server.
I discovered that when I had enabled xdebug in my php.ini settings, I had turned on the profiler which was generating 80 MB files on each page load. When I disabled the profiler, then the site went back to loading normally.