2. The method of claim 1, wherein said second comparison window receives bytes from said byte stream, only if said byte is not part of a multiple-byte match against the first comparison window.
5. The method of claim 2, wherein the buffer includes bytes transferred from the byte stream and received by the buffer, arranged in a linear array of byte positions from an oldest received byte to a newest received byte; wherein the byte in the buffer that is compared against the bytes in the first comparison window and the second comparison window is the byte in the oldest byte position.