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If you are using a shared server, and you are not allowed to make changes, you can ask to increase the memory limit only when doing upgrades. see here: magento.stackexchange.com/questions/90052/…
Yes, It would be like this on production (or more). As long as that's not all the RAM your server has. Development servers are usually kept with the same settings as production servers to make sure everything works fine. I just disable caches while developing.
