What determines revive time?

I don't know the exact formula, but the delay seems to increase by 5 seconds each time you die. It starts at 3 seconds and has a max of 28.

It does not seem to be affected by any other actions, and resets after 2 minutes.

The approximate formula is that every time you die within 2 minutes, 5 seconds is added to the revive timer. If you don't die within 2 minutes the timer resets and you can once again revive in 3 seconds.

As of patch 1.0.7, there is not such thing a death penalty:

The resurrection timer will no longer increase if a player is killed multiple times in a row

Source

The respawn timer when you die keeps increasing , if you wait 2 min it will go back to zero