Pyramids are a way to create overviews of your raster data. Overviews are really useful to enhance performance, especially when you have to serve a large amount of data. In this recipe, we will see how the plugin works and have a discussion about how GeoServer handles overviews.
GeoServer needs an extension plugin to be able to handle pyramids; hence, the first step is to download and install the plugin. As usual, you need to visit the download page and download the zip archive. Visit the following URL:
Get the archive by clicking on the Image Pyramid link in the Coverage Formats section, as shown in the following screenshot:
Extract the
.jar
files contained within the archive into theWEB-INF/lib
folder...