Ask HN: Fastest way to get data from the Hacker News API?

I'm trying to work with the HN API 'v0' (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) to extract all the comment data from a particular thread in real time.

Since the capabilities of API are rather limited, extraction of data becomes a slow process when the thread contains a large number of comments (like > 1000). Even with asynchronous GET requests, I'm averaging 5-6 seconds for all the data to be extracted, which is slow for my purpose.

So my question is, is there any way I can speed up this process?