The achievable performance is very sensitive to the environment. The type and amount of other system activity determine the achievable performance. On the IBM PS/2 system, the number of COM ports or other devices on the same interrupt level significantly affects the achievable performance level.

Trying to receive data at too high a bit rate could cause hardware overrun errors or receive queue overrun errors. Receive queue overrun errors are easily solved by adjusting the communications protocol to the size of the physical device driver receive queue. Trying to transmit data at too high a bit rate could also cause the performance of the operating system to be severely reduced.

The bit rate can be set with the MODE command or with an IOCtl. The bit rate should not be set to values that might cause receive overruns or adverse OS/2 system performance effects.