View never updates

We have a group of processes that update couchbase document. Each processes runs in python under supervisord, two are daily crons. For each process we are using the stale=update_after flag in our views because stale=false was causing a ton of load on our servers (6 of these processes run every 5 minutes grabbing 500 records at a time). The problem we are having is some of our views take days and sometimes a week before they refresh. The crons that run once a day grab records that have recently finished processing and send an email alert, then it marks a “complete” field in the doc. We get that same email several days in a row even though the view is only quering docs where complete=false.

Why aren’t they getting updated after we run the job, per the update_after flag? How can we make sure every view gets refreshed at least once a day?

We are on version 2.1.1.