Population bottlenecks are common in nature, and they can impact the rate of adaptation in evolving populations. On the one hand, each bottleneck reduces the genetic variation that fuels adaptation. On the other hand, fewer founders can undergo more generations and leave more descendants in a resource-limited environment, which allows surviving beneficial mutations to spread more quickly. Here we investigate the impact of repeated bottlenecks on the dynamics of adaptation in experimental populations of Escherichia coli. We propagated 48 populations under four dilution regimes (2-, 8-, 100-, and 1000-fold), all reaching the same final size each day, for 150 days. A simple model in which adaptation is limited by the supply rate of beneficial mutations predicts that fitness gains should be maximized with ~8-fold dilutions. The model also assumes that selection acts only on the overall growth rate and is otherwise identical across dilution regimes. However, we found that selection in the 2-fold regime was qualitatively different from the other treatments. Moreover, we observed earlier and greater fitness gains in the populations subjected to 100- and 1000-fold dilutions than in those that evolved in the 8 fold regime. We also ran simulations using parameters estimated independently from a long-term experiment using the same ancestral strain and environment. The simulations produced dynamics similar to our empirical results under these regimes, and they indicate that the simple model fails owing to the assumption that the supply of beneficial mutations limits adaptation.