By default, any layer on GeoServer is configured for caching. Configuring a layer for caching does not use space on your cache storage until someone starts requesting maps of it. You may consider removing this option if, on your site, you may add a large number of frequently updated layers. Note that by disabling this flag you will need to manually enable caching for each layer you publish.
As you did in Chapter 6, Styling Your Layers, you can configure more than one style for your layers; by default, all the styles are cached. If you add a lot of styles but only one is important, you may want to avoid wasting space in your cache storage and store only tiles rendered with the default style. Consider the following screenshot:
The default metatile size sets dimensions of the map produced by GeoServer when it gets a request for a tile not already stored in the cache. By default, the map produced is composed of 16 tiles. When a request arrives, GeoWebCache checks if there...