Serial port error statistics - any comparable data?

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

Hi,

I have been doing some tests on a device that
we are thinking of incorporating into a product, 
and I have seen that reception on a serial port
at 115200 baud over about six metres of RS-232
cable makes mistakes, to the order of 125 lines
with errors in them out of approximately 18.4
million lines of 65 or so chars - about one errored
line in 147000, or one error character in 95 million.

The PC that is making the errors is a 64 bit dual
core AMD machine running at 2 Gig, and I am 
running stock standard Open Suse 10.3 with 
the supplied Python 2.5.

What kind of bothers me is the nature of the errors -
I seem to get only missing characters, as if an 
interrupt was missed.  There are no munged characters
as one would expect if the errors were bit related.

Has anyone else seen anything like this, and am I worrying
needlessly?

I realise that my production protocols will easily handle
this almost non existent level of error - but if this were in
microcontroller code that I had written myself, I would
suspect that I was spending too long in some critical
section of code.

- Hendrik