subscription email dilemma

[btappan]

I run a forums site where most of my users just stay up to date to the forum through the email subscriptions to threads their interested, In otherwords there is not a lot of traffic to my actual site as most users are just reading the emails instead. My problem is that since there is little to no traffic, the emails being sent with the mailque function enabled are being delayed as long as a day and a half. If disable the mail que function though, when you go to make a new post, the page freezes when you submit your reply as it cant hanle running through all the mails as it submits the reply. (there are about 63 users being emailed each time there is a reply) Is there something I can modify to speed up whatever tells the Mail Que system when to send? Cron Jobs or anything like that?