I'm using an ElmScan5 scantool which uses an FTDI USB-2-RS-232 serial-to-USB chip under Wine 1.6.2 on Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr).
The latency is very high and I found a recommendation on how to reduce it on Windows, but I'm not sure how to do something similar on Linux.
In Windows under COM ports there is an option to reduce the latency timer:
Call Device Manager, find your USB port. (1) Call Properties; (2) Call advanced (3) Change Latency Timer from 16 to 2 or 1 ms.
In order to get the software working under Wine I had to add the following to the Wine registry file:
[Hardware\\Devicemap\\Serialcomm] 1015709345
"Serial0"="COM1"
So I don't know if this is a Linux or a Wine issue.