Communication lag using Arduino Mega 2560

Using Arduino Interfacing w/ Software on the Computer
8

To give more details

  1. the cutoff of how much lag is required for the Mega to work is between 830 and 840 millis
  2. the cutoff is about the same for each Mega
  3. when it works near the cutoff, two nulls get printed to the screen and then it's numbers. when I'm far away from the cutoff, a single null gets printed.
  4. following up on some other posts I saw, I tried running the program with the arduino editor closed. It didn't do anything.