[SalesForce] Sharing rule on Detail object

High volume customer portal users do not have access to the sharing model. They cannot be added to groups or sharing roles. From the documentation:

https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=customer_portal_manage_users.htm&language=en#CPsharingrules

The issue is some combination of data skew and (potentially) ownership skew. Furthermore, sharing rules might lengthen the time of parent record locks, leading to increased chances for row locks.

Data Skew

Because all records of both objects are related to the (single) Parent Account, the update of each Opportunity and the insertion of each Opp_Revenue__c will briefly lock the Parent Account in order to maintain DB integrity and to recalculate sharing. There is a risk that an update to a child record will fail because a previous child record is still holding the lock on the Parent Account.

Remedy: Divide the single Parent Account into several and evenly distribute the child Accounts between them. Group the Opportunity batches by limiting the scope to one (grand)Parent account at a time.

SF Developer Blog: Data Skew Row Locks

Ownership Skew

If there is a default/"generic" owner for many/all of these records, and they have a nested (not top-level) role in the Role Hierarchy, sharing recalculations for Opportunities and Opp_Revenue__c will take longer to complete, increasing the chances of row locks.

Remedy: Either re-assign the Accounts to different individuals, remove the skewed owner's role, or place the skewed owner in their own role at the top of the hierarchy without child nodes. Also make sure any sharing rules used to grant visibility to skewed records are as restrictive as possible by granting access specifically to users who need it.

SF Developer Blog: Ownership Data Skew Row Locks

Sharing Rules

As stated off-handedly in the first section entitled "Problem Diagnosis" of this SF Developer Blog, "Lydia also doesn’t realize that the sharing configuration that she and Mike set up prior to the data load is further contributing to the poor loading performance which is then magnifying her lock contention problems." Although it doesn't mention sharing rules explicitly, it seems to make sense to me that including certain sharing rules that call for many sharing records to be created might lengthen the time of row locks.

Remedy: Change the OWD sharing defaults for the Account object, or grant "view all" or "modify all" permissions via permission sets or at the profile level for those users who need access to these records, if feasible.

Additional Resource: SF Record Locking Cheatsheet

NOTE: If you are using the Bulk API rather than batch apex, disable parallel loading.

It still strikes me as odd that row locks are an issue in your case, since common wisdom says this typically only becomes a skew issue when there are >10k child records or >10k records of the same object owned by a single owner...