Seeding a layer

As of now, we have used the GeoWebCache to store tiles produced by user requests. Of course, the following requests with equal parameters will hit the cache and GeoServer will not render a new map for them.

However, you can also precalculate the tiles for a layer to avoid some users experiencing a delay when requesting zoom levels and areas not yet cached.

The process of precalculating tiles is called seeding. This section will guide you in understanding how it works:

1. Go to the Tile Layers page and look for the Packt:ne_50m_rivers_lake_centerlines layer. Click on the Seed/Truncate link for it:

2. A new page will open. The GeoWebCache seeding is not integrated in the GeoServer web interface. What you see is the GeoWebCache interface:

3. Scroll to the Create a new task section. You have to set the parameters for the seeding. The first one is the number of parallel processes; that is, threads that will request maps to GeoServer. As we have a single GeoServer instance, there is no gain...