simplepie to grab RSS comments list

Hi All,

I have some code that integrate my forums post comments to thread replies as comments on the thread.

To do this I use simplepie to hit a custom page on my forum which runs the a few queries

1 – Get the link (the threadid from the custom table)
2 – Get the thread and replies
3 – count the replies

The page outputs XML and is then simplepie interprets this into comment and comment count.

This happens for every wordpress post. Both on the front page and on the post pages (though on the post page it only happens for the specific post we are on)

I think that this likely causes a fair bit of load issues as I have over 5000 posts on my wordpress site.

Just wondering if there may be a better way that will cause less load to grab all of the comments rather than the multiple queries and XML?

I am using 3600 cache and 30 second timeout on this as well

Dan