Why does my 1GB 1CPU Droplet running NGINX show better loadtest results than my 4GB 2CPU droplet?

I am testing out using a DO droplet for hosting a single static site. I am running Ubuntu 18.10 on the $5 droplet and on the $40 droplet, both standard on NY 1. I installed NGINX on both. The small droplet has nothing else installed, and was not updated at all. The second, larger droplet was updated, has ufw (which I disabled with no performance difference) and Node, but there is no node app running. I ran loadtest against both servers from my laptop running off my home wifi:

loadtest http://ipaddress/static-file -t 10 -c 20 --rps 50

The result is strange. The small droplet is completing over 400 requests, while the larger droplet is only completing around 20. Latency is also a magnitude larger on the larger droplet. I ran this several times with similar results. Any ideas would be helpful. I am not sure if the issue is hardware/software difference between the droplets, a result of some package that was updated in Ubuntu, something else? If the results were not so drastically different I would not have bothered to post this, but the stark difference is alarming. I would expect the performance to be more like the smaller droplet than the larger one.

Any ideas would be helpful.