Bid Bots

When you bid on a steem bid bot, you expect, that the round length is as declared.
144 Minutes long.
But is this always the case?
I looked into the voting patterns of all bid bots known to me and took their data of the last 30 days.

Data gathering

I searched for all voting transactions of every bot and took the time between those transactions.
Everything below 8000 seconds I did not count, most of the time deltas is about 1 minute, the time between votes, after a biding window.
from this data ( >8000 seconds) I took the median and the average mean and put it in this list.
This list is sorted by median, ascending.

Bidbot	Median(Minutes)	Mean(Minutes)
@aksdwi	135	149
@sleeplesswhale	143	149
@discordia	144	150
@moneymatchgaming	144	157
@steembloggers	144	160
@steemdiffuser	144	150
@lovejuice	145	155
@upgoater	145	150
@voter	145	151
@msp-bidbot	145	152
@kittybot	145	150
@hellowhale	145	167
@votebuster	145	148
@microbot	145	152
@upyou	145	146
@upmewhale	145	159
@mercurybot	145	151
@boostme	145	335
@seakraken	145	201
@voterunner	145	163
@minnowvotes	145	148
@mrswhale	146	258
@smartsteem	146	161
@ipromote	146	178
@adriatik	147	181
@levitation	148	154
@allaz	149	161
@upmyvote	150	154
@sneaky-ninja	152	157
@pushup	152	162
@booster	152	156
@yourwhale	152	169
@postpromoter	153	159
@jerrybanfield	154	161
@boomerang	156	171
@minnowhelper	157	164
@nettybot	159	169
@buildawhale	177	183
@appreciator	178	184
@upme	186	192

Analysis

This is very revealing.
It seems, that a lot of bots wait, until they are profitable and execute the voting.
My own bot, @microbot, needs 145/152 Minutes between votes.
I consider this not good, but ok.
I have no idea, why the mean is over 150 for my bot, as it runs in a 3 minutes cycle.
Sometimes, the RPC fails, and the bot has currently 0 profit, nothing to run my own RPC on.

But everything over 150 on median and mean I would consider cheating not really nice for the user, but in most cases necessary;).

I don't expect any owners of those bots to answer me.
But you, dear reader can make your own guesses.
And resteem this, or if you want, I can give you more details/codes/data, to continue this topic on your own and post your own analysis.

Update

@themarkymark explains, why @buildawhale needs 160 minutes or longer:

We wait to 100% every round, like all the other bots. If our votes take up more than 2% that means it will take longer to recharge.
When Steem was 0.86, we would get 30-60 bids per window and most were higher than the minimum bid. Bidding windows were extremely consistent and almost perfectly 10 a day.
Now that Steem has climbed 500% we receive a lot more bids as it is still profitable. A majority of the bids are the minimum amount which gives a better return due to rounding errors. This increases how long it takes to bid which isn't really a big deal until it took over an hour to do bids when it used to take 2-5 minutes.
Due to the fact, the number of bids increased by about 700%, the percentage of each vote went down dramatically and causes more voting power to be used (due to the rounding issues mentioned) per $1 upvoted.
That is the main cause of the windows taking longer, I have increased minimum bids to 2 SBD and now 2.5 SBD to decrease the unique bids per window. It still isn't perfect and we still drain more than what a 100% full vote would drain.
We doing the best we can with the tools available. As I said before when we raised our bid to 2 SBD, mathematically, our minimum bid should be 5 SBD, but I don't want to make it unavailable to small users.
There is nothing malicious going on, at least in our case, it's just the inefficiencies showing themselves as things scale.

Thanks, that explains a lot for me!
:)