As of now we have used the GeoWebCache for storing tiles produced by user request. Of course following requests with equal parameters will hit the cache and GeoServer won't render a new map for them.
But you can also pre-calculate the tiles for a layer to avoid some users experiencing a delay when requesting zoom levels and areas not yet cached.
The process of pre-calculating tiles is called seeding . This section will guide you to understand how it works.
Go to the Tile layers page and look for the tl_2011_us_county layer. Click on the Seed/Truncate link for it:
A new page will open. The GeoWebCache seeding is not integrated in the GeoServer web interface. What you see is the GeoWebCache interface:
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 in running too...