I'm trying to write a program that utilizes the Wikipedia API. As far as I can tell, the simplest way to use the API is to access an HTTP page with the requested command, for instance, this finds all links on the "Apple" wikipedia article. I want to implement commands like these into my Java program so I created the following snippet to fetch the data from a HTTP page:

    URLConnection connection = null;    // Connection to the URL data
    InputStreamReader iSR = null;       // Stream of the URL data
    BufferedReader bR = null;           // Reader of URL data
    URL url = null;                     // URL based on the specified link

    // Open the connection to the URL web page
    url = new URL(link);
    connection = url.openConnection();

    // Initialize the Readers
    iSR = new InputStreamReader(connection.getInputStream());
    bR = new BufferedReader(iSR);

    // Fetch all of the lines from the buffered reader and join them all
    // together into a single string.
    return bR.lines().collect(Collectors.joining("\n"));

This works fine for fetching data, however, it is very slow. Each fetch takes around half a second, which is unacceptable for my program, especially since processing the whole downloaded file only takes around 1/1000th of a second. Is there any way that I can somehow quickly download these small files?