Update: loading issues seem to have gone away, at least under our current high load. Although the high connection numbers still persist, the load time is much quicker.
What did we change? For some reason we had stale set to false. We removed stale from the query and as a result no longer have page delays under our current high load. However we did notice a slight slow down (maybe 2 seconds instead of 500ms) last night but ultimately didn’t cause any issues.
As for the sample code above not including the stale setting, we’re assuming the stale setting on other queries were causing the sample code to not execute by occupying/locking the server.