Method and apparatus for reducing host overhead in a socket server implementation

A network application executing on a host system provides a list of application buffers in host memory stored in a queue to a network services processor coupled to the host system. The application buffers are used for storing data transferred on a socket established between the network application and a remote network application executing in a remote host system. Using the application buffers, data received by the network services processor over the network is transferred between the network services processor and the application buffers. After the transfer, a completion notification is written to one of the two control queues in the host system. The completion notification includes the size of the data transferred and an identifier associated with the socket. The identifier identifies a thread associated with the transferred data and the location of the data in the host system.