stale=false view performance up to 10x slower than stale=ok or stale=update_after with no data changing

I have a very basic case where I am trying to understand the performance difference between the various stale options. I've created the beer-sample bucket and have no incoming workload.

Running this command:
for i in `seq 1 1000`; do curl "http://ec2-54-176-27-210.us-west-1.compute.amazo
naws.com:8092/beer-sample/_design/beer/_view/brewery_beers?inclusive_end=false&s
tale=update_after&connection_timeout=60000&limit=1&skip=0" > /dev/null 2> /dev/n
ull; done

Yields about 80 view requests/sec.

Changing that to stale=false gets only about 9 or 10 view requests/sec.

With 2.5.1, they are almost identical.

So two questions:
-Is this difference in performance to be expected?
-Is there any tuning or profiling I can do to improve it?