JQuery ajax freezes ui when response is very large

When I use JQuery ajax function and the response is quite large ~1mb the ui gets frozen just before the success function is called. I have experienced this with the JSON.parse function and parsing a large amount of data. I believe that this function is used on the return of the request to format the content into JSON. Here is the code I am using.

$.ajax({
        url: "/sessions/" + this.get("session_id") + "/get_sample_data",
        data: params,
        dataType: 'json',
        type: "GET",
        success: function (response) {
            success(response);
        }
    });

Is there anyway to override the code for the response so I can stagger the parsing into parts and hopefully minimise the blocking on the ui? or is there another way to fix this. I am using chrome and chrome canary and I get the same result in both.

Thanks in advance