Flask "Always on" Connection to External SOAP API

Question

I am working on an application that needs to send/retrieve data from a SOAP API. The WSDL file is provided to me as a C# library and using the clr module I have built a class with all the functions I need from it.

class SoapAPI:
    def __init__(self):
        # Initialize Service
        oBinding = BasicHttpBinding()
        oBinding.Security.Mode = BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport
        oEndpointAddress = EndpointAddress(os.environ.get('API_URL'))
        self.oService = ApiClient(oBinding, oEndpointAddress)
    def function_a(self, foo):
        # Do something
        pass
    def function_b(self, bar):
        # Do something else
        pass
    def close(self):
        # Close Service
        self.oService.Close()

The issue I'm having is that connecting to the service takes about two seconds, making the application extremely slow for the user when viewing a page that requires access to the API.

I need an "always on" connection to the service.

I was thinking of creating a handler for these requests that would ensure the connection to the SOAP service is always active and would queue* the requests to be sent. However, I have no idea how to integrate this with Flask.

Should I create another app to which Flask will connect for these API calls instead?

*Requests need to be queued because as per the API docs I should not use more than 5 concurrent connections.