Errors when minimized

Yeah, from experience I know the CPU being pushed will cause more skipped turns, though you get the impression it should be immune to that. I usually attribute it to the CPU measurement being inaccurate and the high load exacerbating it somehow. You'll also skip more turns against a CPU heavy opponent.

One interesting thing I've found with BerryBots is that when I'm drawing graphics, bots take about twice as much CPU time. I've guessed it has to do with memory or CPU cache misses increasing when it's switching between robot code and graphics code. I could imagine a similar change in cache behavior when a CPU starts experiencing high load - maybe the Robocode engine code is what stays cached in that case and so your bot takes longer. But I'm just speculating and don't really know that much about CPU cache behavior.

Any PIFs that hit the end of the round I discard. I pull a bigger cluster than I need and just do the first N that work.

Keeping separate logs for each round is more accurate, but with bigger codesize as well.