A network host such as a caching device is disclosed that greatly increases the speed with which a server reads and writes data for clients. The host may include a specialized network interface that not only processes TCP but also parses received network file system headers, identifying those headers within the TCP data stream, separating them from any corresponding network file system data, and providing them separately from that data to the network file system of the host for processing as a batch, all without any interrupt to the host. Similarly, the network file system of the host may communicate directly with the network interface by writing network file system headers directly to a register of the network interface to transmit data.