You're right. With a super-contrived test case, I got the described behavior. Somehow, in all the the hundreds of millions (guesstimate) of rows I've used SELE

You're right. With a super-contrived test case, I got the described behavior. Somehow, in all the the hundreds of millions (guesstimate) of rows I've used SELECT FOR UPDATE NOWAIT to process without lock conflicts, I've never actually gotten the error. At a guess, because I've generally always also used a LIMIT clause, and there have always been enough unlocked rows available to satisfy that. Apologies for the noise.