PhantomJs and Nodejs very slow

I have created a rest service with nodejs, where for the response it goes to a certain page and scrape some date using the phantomjs version of nodejs.

The whole process is very slow (I had to move to another server because some connections were automatically timeout after 30 seconds).

Another problem (as is my understanding) is that the server is single thread so it takes even a lot more to respond if it is already processing another request. My questions are:

1. 
   

   Is there a way to speed up the whole process?

   
   


2. 
   

   Is there a way to make the nodejs run multithreaded?

   
   


3. 
   

   Most important would a Java implementaion of the same services (with selenium) would be faster or allow multithreading? Thanks