From what I remember, Chubby was one of those services that was a bit more sensitive to poor client behavior. You could cause problems for other users with poor Chubby behavior, and you could accidentally end up with code that causes a high Chubby load.
Chubby is a lot like etcd except without the hindsight. Distributed locking is pretty complicated and if I remember correctly there was a great podcast from Google's Kube podcast about distributed locking that goes into a lot of this. [0]
If you are going to do any distributed locking I strongly recommend listening to it. Has a lot of pain points discussed.
