  The time-delay-based reservoir computing setup has seen tremendous success in
both experiment and simulation. It allows for the construction of large
neuromorphic computing systems with only few components. However, until now the
interplay of the different timescales has not been investigated thoroughly. In
this manuscript, we investigate the effects of a mismatch between the
time-delay and the clock cycle for a general model. Typically, these two time
scales are considered to be equal. Here we show that the case of equal or
resonant time-delay and clock cycle could be actively detrimental and leads to
an increase of the approximation error of the reservoir. In particular, we can
show that non-resonant ratios of these time scales have maximal memory
capacities. We achieve this by translating the periodically driven
delay-dynamical system into an equivalent network. Networks that originate from
a system with resonant delay-times and clock cycles fail to utilize all of
their degrees of freedom, which causes the degradation of their performance.
