I've gotten more experience with the issue and now I find it doesn't really seem to matter who is or isn't nearby; out of every maybe 6 times I start the bot, one will give me almost unblemished frame rate and the other five will give me frame lag central. So I start and stop, start and stop, start and stop my bot till I get the high frame rate version.
If I start with low frame rate and run to an empty zone, the frame rate remains relatively low. If I start with high frame rate and run into the middle of a crowd, the frame rate remains relatively high. Like I said, the frame rate when it starts is the frame rate it remains until I stop the bot. The bot runs fine in both cases, though the lack of frames causes slower processing in the bot.
I'm trying to dig deeper into the issue but I'm running into dead ends. Either a slow component is failing to initialize 1/6 of the time or a fast component IS initializing 1/6 of the time. Who knows.