Generally speaking, being fast is rather pointless. What you need, is to adjust your ticket fees, so that they are priced competitively. With default (aka: low) ticket fees, you'll get beaten by other folks that setup for very high fees during the ticket price dips.
There's a utility on the recent release that can do a lot of ticket/fee intelligence, so that you can get your tickets in, without having to go crazy high on fees. I'm still just doing it the manual way, and no trouble here
Thanks for the info
This is the command I use to buy tickets
dcrctl -u [user] -P [password] --wallet purchaseticket "default" [price rounded up to nearest int] 1 [my wallet address]
What should I add to control for fees and what fees should I pay. I only buy tickets when price is cheap btw
Very simply put, you need to use the wallet "setticketfee" command, and set a fee that gives your tickets enough priority to get mined on time.
When you are about to buy tickets, you can look at recent blocks on the official explorer, click on a ticket purchase transaction, and the details there will show you what was the per KB ticket fee on that one. If you look at a few such tickets, you'll get a good sense of what your fee needs to be set at.
Hint: You need to find the fees per KB, not the actual fee amount that the transaction paid. When you do "setticketfee", you are setting fees per KB also, the actual fee value per transaction will vary (depending on inputs/outputs, etc).
There is also an expiry parameter that you can use with purchaseticket, but I don't recall if that only works when you are buying tickets for pool staking. The expiry parameter is quite useful, in that it sets your purchase attempts to automatically cancel themselves out, if not mined within a target number of blocks.
So with that, you can try to buy with ticket fee set at some value and set a short expiration. If the tickets do not get mined/confirmed before they expire, then you can increase the fee a little, and try again. And so on.
Note that buying tickets slightly more expensive, usually makes things much easier and you end up saving on fees, 'cos there's much less competition.