Serial port slow

Resident

I'm having trouble with an RS232 connection to COM1 on the controller. On the virtual controller I am using sockets to talk from VC -> PC and then a separate program to communicate PC -> device -- this is to get around the VC not allowing serial connections. When running from the VC, I can poll the device and receive responses quite fast (a loop of get result, print result scrolls too fast to read), however when do the same code on the physical controller, I get maybe 1 result every two seconds. This is extremely slow.

Is there any way to speed this up?