I’m voting that its something in your code as well, as 3ventic suggests, because the delays you see in b0aty’s channel is still quite larger than I would expect to see.
For example, I went into b0aty’s channel and did the same exercise with my bot and the time stamps are ~1 second apart as one would expect (excluding delay for non-mods, but I think you circumvent that if you are connected via IRC anyways)