view not emit'ing valid fields when document is large

["Barry, Mike" <Mi...@refworks-cos.com>]

I have an interesting case where I have a small db with a small handful (3) of large documents
(about 15M each).  And I have a view as such:

function(doc) {
  emit(doc._id, doc.status);
}

the docs only have a couple of fields (status just being a string of "current" or "past") but one of the fields is a large
array of guids (about 450K entries).

Now in my dev instance of couchdb, the view returns the status fine but in my test instance (replicated from the
dev instance), the view returns a null for status.

AFAIK, the dev and test instances are the same (same base OS, same version couchdb, same version erlang, same
version js engine etc).

The logs are not spitting out any errors during view creation.

Any pointers as to why couch would spit out a null field value would be appreciated.

Thanks.