Salesforce Sync Error: UNABLE_TO_LOCK_ROW

I'm starting to wonder if this may have something to do with the recent Salesforce performance issues.  Our instance has had performance degradations yesterday and Monday.

Weird, we just got this error (for the first time) today as well! Kenny, is it possible that something has recently changed in Marketo or SFDC which would cause this error? Just seems a little too convenient that it's happened to several people just recently. 

Hi Kenny,

Thank you for your reply. This is the first time we received an error like this.  I checked in with our SFDC Admin and no new AppExchange apps or API integrations have been deployed in the last two weeks. Reading through the articles you sent, it seems like this can happen due to updates with custom objects and lookup fields, could you expand on this?  Also, are there any other examples of when Salesforce would throw this error? 

Thanks again!
-Val

Hey Val and Elena,

This indicates that when attempting to write to a record it is already being written or locked by another record.  You can find more extensive explanations here: http://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/27093/salesforce-parent-locking-unable-to-lock-row https://developer.salesforce.com/blogs/engineering/2013/04/managing-lookup-skew-to-avoid-record-lock-exceptions.html

Marketo will retry an operation a few times if this keeps being received, but will fail and move on if it happens too many times.  If these have recently become common, you might want to look into any new API integrations to SFDC which you've deployed or any new AppExchange packages with your SFDC Admin, tosee if you might be able to tune it o avoid these collisions.

Ohh, same stuff going on for the last week or so. Just subscribing to hear if there's an answer.