Practical GIS

Tiling your maps

One of the greatest perks of GeoServer is its internal tiling and tile-caching capability. It uses GeoWebCache, which is integrated into GeoServer, and enabled by default. Of course, this behavior can be also considered a downside, as cached tiles always use up some disk space. GeoServer's default tiling behavior is dynamic. It creates tiles on demand, and stores them until expiration for reuse. Tiling can greatly increase the speed of serving images, with the expense of additional disk usage. Although there are multiple tiling services served by GeoServer, every one of them can be served with the same tiles (gridset). Only the layout differs, which is calculated by GeoServer before serving the right tiles.

If we go to