A clock-and-data recovery circuit for serial receiver includes a jitter meter and an adaptive loop gain adjustment circuitry. The clock-recovery circuitry phase aligns a clock signal to the incoming data. A jitter meter provides a measure of jitter, while adaptation circuitry uses the measure to adjust the clock-recovery circuitry in a manner that reduces clock jitter. The jitter measure can be a ratio of errors associated with different inter-symbol slew rates.