"The alert came through four minutes after the stream started" is one of the most common things we hear, and the cause is almost never the same twice. Here is how to tell which one you are looking at.
Check what the platform said first
Every alert starts with the platform telling us a stream went live. Twitch sends that within seconds. YouTube can take a minute or two. If the platform was slow, nothing downstream can make up the difference.
The quickest test: open the stream page and look at the uptime counter when the alert lands. Under a minute is normal. Consistently over three suggests something worth reporting.
Rate limits are per-channel
Discord limits how fast a bot can post in a single channel. One server sending alerts for forty streamers into one channel will queue during a busy evening, which looks exactly like a delay and is not one.
Splitting across two or three channels removes the queue entirely, and is the single fix that resolves most "late alerts" reports.
Very short streams may not alert at all
A stream that starts and ends inside a minute sometimes produces no alert. The transition to live is what triggers the notification, and if the channel has already gone offline by the time we act on it, there is nothing to announce. This affects people who restart their stream to fix an encoder setting more than anyone else.
What you cannot fix
Platform-side delay, and the propagation time on scheduled events. Both are outside the bot. Everything else — permissions, rate limits, misconfigured channels — is fixable in a couple of minutes.