Ways to deal with thousands of features of vector layer in OpenLayers

I am building a webgis portal too show a big number of polylines (road network) and points (villages, cities etc.). All my data are stored in a POSTGIS and throuh geoserver and Openlayers I display them on the map. For displaying I use two WFS vector layer (one for each geometry). I decided to use WFS instead of a WMS (WMSGetFeatureInfo) as this is what geoserver manual suggests here (regarding the GetFeatureInfo and GetFeature).

The problem comes when the number of features becomes relative big (around 10000 thousand features). My question is how can I deal with such a big number of features. I know one solution is BBOX but I am afraid this can slow things down by sending multiple requests. Is there another strategy out there?

Thanks a lot. D.