Although you did not know it, you have already used caching. GeoWebCache is shipped with GeoServer, and caching is enabled by default when you add a new layer to the GeoServer configuration. However, you may want to customize the caching configuration. Most of the parameters may be tuned from the GeoServer's web interface. The repository for tiles is not one of them. To change it, you need to edit the configuration files.
Caching will produce a lot of files, and storage requires quite a lot of space on your disk. By default, all the files are stored on the same filesystem where you installed GeoServer. A common issue is that you can run out of free space or available inodes on Linux filesystems. The result is the same--you won't be able to store anything more on the filesystem, and you may also crash your system. We will use a custom location for the cache files:
- Locate your
webapps/geoserver/WEB-INFfolder inside the Apache Tomcat installation folder:
~$ cd /opt...