Methods and systems for improving efficiency of direct cache access (DCA) are provided. According to one embodiment, a set of DCA control settings are defined by a network I/O device of a network security device for each of multiple I/O device queues based on network security functionality performed by corresponding CPUs of a host processor. The control settings specify portions of network packets that are to be copied to a cache of the corresponding CPU. A packet is received by the network I/O device. Information associated with the packet is queued onto an I/O device queue. The information is then transferred from the I/O device queue to a host memory of the network security device. Based on the control settings for the I/O device queue only those portions of the information corresponding to the one or more specified portions are copied to the cache of the corresponding CPU.