I see this question asked a lot in the Leo Finance Discord and the answer generally given is 4 hrs, twice a day, once a day, or some other arbitrary time period.
I also saw a few harvest calculators to give you a good idea when it is best to harvest. While they may work, what I do is much simpler and more universal.
Right now it costs around 0.000997 BNB to compound in a Den. At the current BNB price of $535.99, this comes out to $0.517131 transaction fee.
Let's say you decide to compound once a day, and that comes out to 5 cubs based on your stake. At the current cub price of $3.795, that is roughly 2.75% transaction fee.
Now let's say you harvest 30 cubs a day, you can expect to pay around 0.454% in transaction fees.
As you may guess, the optimal time to harvest is less a universal set amount of time but more how much you have to harvest in said amount of time. If you are providing liquidity, you can expect to pay transaction fees to harvest, then to buy liquidity, then to stake the LP token.
My suggestion is to figure out a transaction fee percentage you are comfortable, I suggest 0.5-1% or less, and use that as a guideline of when the best time to harvest for yourself is. Or even easier, if you are in the den, just harvest when you have around $100 or more to harvest. If you are providing liquidity, wait a little longer to account for the three transaction fees. Once you know how long that takes to harvest, you can use that as a guideline.
You do not have to harvest as much as you think, harvesting eight times a day (every 4 hours) won't make as much difference to your bottom line as you think. In most cases you can just harvest once or twice a day and best pretty close to optimal.
Your results may vary, but this should help give you better insight on how often you should harvest and give you some relief you don't have to stay at your computer all day to harvest on a set schedule.
