That number of files is going to take a while (if it takes one minute per track it's 32 days...), where are you storing the files to, if they're currently on a network share and you're saving them back to a network share it's going to slow things down. If you can copy a batch at a time to a local disk and then convert them that will speed things up a bit.
I've just converted 10 files from FLAC to mp3 on this laptop (Core i3), on local disk but running on battery power, that took 91 seconds and that's doing 4 tracks in parallel (multi-core), at that rate it would take me about 5 days to do that lot, so you're not going to get it done in half an hour... Faster processor you could bring it down a bit but there are limits.