Methods and systems for accelerating data communication by reducing network latency particularly by data compression in which requested data is recursively compressed by an encoder and sent to the requester in codes which may or may not be understood by the requester. The requester can subsequently request data corresponding to unknown codes. The request-reply sequence is also recursive and continues until the requested data is present at the requester. To further accelerate communication, a persistently connected network is employed, together with a new socket layer capable of combining multiple messages from different machines, threads, and/or processes into single TCP/IP packets to be relayed along message hubs in the persistent network. These features are introduced singly and combined to create a new caching network. A new content distribution network can take advantage of these data communication improvements since requested content can be distributed in caches in a caching network.