pyserial issues with high baudrate FTDI - buffer

Question

I have the following setup:
A FPGA sending out data on UART at a baudrate of 3Mbps. The data transmitted is a chunk of 1024 bytes sent at a variable periodicity ranging from 20ms to 200ms. (So even in the worst case, datarate is far from 3Msps)
A FTDI 232RG
A piece of python running on my computer (Windows), doing basically : opening a COM port with pyserial, 3Msps, polling the in_waiting until it reaches the size of a packet (1024 bytes), formatting the packet received and print it on the screen
The script works well for low repetition frequency, but I face issues with higher repetitions (typically 20ms). When the periodicity in 20ms I eventually end up getting a buffer overflow somewhere before the in_waiting. I checked the timing of my python loop and it takes about 4ms. So it looks like there is something upstream (in the FTDI or Windows) that feeds the pyserial buffer with more than one packet within the 4ms following a packet.
I tried changing the FTDI latency in the driver (from 16ms default down to a few ms) but it does not seem to help.
I am currently clueless about what is happening. Would you have any advice about how to understand better what is happening?
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You could create a "loop" between TX and RX and run the following code (tested with a FT2232H, so mostlikely you need to change the identifier string):
import time
import serial
import serial.tools.list_ports
print([(x[0],x[2]) for x in serial.tools.list_ports.comports()])
port = [x[0] for x in serial.tools.list_ports.comports() if "FT4Q1LJFB" in x[2]][0]
ser = serial.Serial(port,12000000)
while True:
t0 = time.time()
counter = 0
for i in range(1000):
ser.write([1]*3000)
recv = ser.read(ser.inWaiting())
delta_t = time.time() - t0
counter += len(recv)
print(counter / delta_t)
For me the following output is shown
[('COM7', 'USB VID:PID=0403:6010 SER=FT4Q1LJFA'), ('COM8', 'USB VID:PID=0403:6010 SER=FT4Q1LJFB')]
0.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
96787.81184093593
1201991.0268273412
1201197.0857713912
1201166.9350959768
1201445.4072856384
You will notice that it is 0.0 in the beginning. This is because I connected RX and TX after starting the program resulting in a ramping up of the received bytes. This is the "default" mode meaning 8 bits + 1 start bit + 1 stop bit = 10 bits per word which explains why "only" 1.2 Mbytes per second are transmitted.