Transaction issues in SiteService/ADS in production

Optus tried to deploy a site with 145 campaigns that deadlocked under a high load. Because the site did not deploy when optus tried to deploy campaigns campaign deployment failed.

Snippet from the logs:

<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soap:Body><ns2:publishDeployResultRequest xmlns:ns2="http://staffware.proxy.oda.isdp.optus.com/"><header><requestID>53701</requestID><retryID>1</retry
ID></header><source>site_generation</source><customerID>85777843000149-0481102461</customerID><deployResult><type>return_code</type><result><resultCode>failure</resultCode><resultString>Information: ERROR Could not update CustomizableCon
tentField :: PreparedStatementCallback; SQL [UPDATE contentField SET content_element_variation_id = ?, default_value = ?, value = ?, customized = ?, pinned = ? WHERE customizable_entity_id = ? AND tag = ? ]; Deadlock found when trying t
o get lock; try restarting transaction; nested exception is com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLTransactionRollbackException: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction; nested exception is:
751901:Payload: <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soap:Body><ns2:publishDeployResultRequest xmlns:ns2="http://staffware.proxy.oda.isdp.optus.com/"><header><requestID>53701</requestID><retryID>1</retry
ID></header><source>site_generation</source><customerID>85777843000149-0481102461</customerID><deployResult><type>return_code</type><result><resultCode>failure</resultCode><resultString>Information: ERROR Could not update CustomizableCon
tentField :: PreparedStatementCallback; SQL [UPDATE contentField SET content_element_variation_id = ?, default_value = ?, value = ?, customized = ?, pinned = ? WHERE customizable_entity_id = ? AND tag = ? ]; Deadlock found when trying t
o get lock; try restarting transaction; nested exception is com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLTransactionRollbackException: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction; nested exception is:
1119616:Payload: <soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"><soap:Body><ns2:publishDeployResultRequest xmlns:ns2="http://staffware.proxy.oda.isdp.optus.com/"><header><requestID>53701</requestID><retryID>1</retr
yID></header><source>site_generation</source><customerID>85777843000149-0481102461</customerID><deployResult><type>return_code</type><result><resultCode>success</resultCode></result><time>2012-10-02T09:48:30.195+10:00</time></deployResul
t></ns2:publishDeployResultRequest></soap:Body></soap:Envelope>