Interesting Speed Observation Using a Simple Ruby Script

One day I was a little bored and thinking about a simple speed test, which I quickly threw together and previously posted about. The thing is that I saw some inconsistencies in speed depending on how I was connected to the machine.

Here's the Ruby script I threw together:

for n in 1...1000000 do
        puts "#{n}"
end

Other pertinent information: 
Ruby version: ruby 2.0.0p247 (2013-06-27 revision 41674) [universal.x86_64-darwin13]
OS X version 10.9.2
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM

Before leaving the office, I connected to the test machine through SSH. This is a straight SSH connection from a terminal, no VPN or anything like that. I ran the script with a simple

time ruby ./rubytest.rb

Results when SSH'd in:
Run 1:
real 0m54.064s
user 0m5.020s
sys 0m3.501s

Run 2:
real   0m53.146s
user   0m5.134s
sys  0m3.451s

Run 3:
real 0m54.862s
user   0m4.986s
sys 0m3.356s

Once I got home I ran the script on the terminal locally.
Run 1:
real   0m16.106s
user   0m5.324s
sys    0m3.840s

Run 2:
real   0m15.469s
user   0m5.307s

sys    0m3.771s

Run 3:
real   0m15.293s
user   0m5.344s
sys    0m3.750s

Was this something introduced by using SSH? I used SSH to connect to localhost and tried again...
Run 1:
real   0m10.477s
user   0m5.016s

sys    0m3.327s

Run 2:
real   0m10.894s
user   0m5.092s

sys    0m3.382s

Run 3:
real   0m11.278s
user   0m5.112s

sys    0m3.403s

I don't know the reason for this exactly. The amazing part was connecting to SSH locally and having it speed up the script. All I can figure is that SSH is compressing console output, and when I'm connected over the Internet the connection is still lagged but connecting from localhost gives an advantage despite processing overhead of the compression, and Ruby is somehow constrained to how fast the data can be dumped into the console (maybe it waits for some kind of acknowledgement that output is actually output before moving to the next calculation?)

For me it's speculation. I'll have to see if I can find answers somewhere.

NINJA EDIT: I posted the question to unix.stackexchange.com and got some excellent answers!