Just wanted to follow up on this question in case it helps anyone.
While I didn't figure out the direct answer to my load spike question, I did discover another bug from inspecting the logs that I was able to solve.
In my case, running "sudo service couchdb stop" was not actually stopping couchdb. On top of that, every couple of seconds a new process of couch would try and spawn only to be blocked by the existing couchdb process.
Ultimately, removing the respawn flag /etc/init.d/couchdb fixed this error.