I'm building an HTML5 massively multiplayer online game. I've been working on this project for awhile, but am having some trouble sorting through a couple of performance issues.

Since this is a multiplayer game, information is sent to and received from the network. When a client needs to know about new entities on the screen, the server must stream this data.

Unfortunately, one big problem I'm having right now is that sometimes either a) a lot of data needs to be streamed or b) lots of small pieces of data are streamed in a short amount of time. Both scenarios currently cause the client to drop rendering frames as the client spends its time receiving packets and processing the data.

What is the best way to prevent the networking data from causing frame rate problems?