Hi Zachary,
Your other option may be to make some of the JSF stuff stateless to avoid rendering of the page. This is not native to the JSF implementation but we have had a crack at it to assist with similar issues when dealing with a JSF / Client Side Javascript AJAX type situation you are describing.
There is a better explanation and sample implementation here:
http://industrieit.com/blog/2011/11/stateless-jsf-high-performance-zero-per-request-memory-overhead/
Cheers
Brendan