A perennial favorite on this blog is “GeoServer and efficient delivery of raster data (image pyramid layer)“. I am neither the last nor the first authority on this topic (check the GeoSolutions blog for authoritative work on GeoServer and raster, also look to the GeoServer documentation), but I’ve had some good experiences with serving rasters in GeoServer, especially using image pyramid layers

Read the original, as this will just augment, but here are some targets to hit with the retiling necessary for larger datasets. This is the command I currently use for the retiling:

gdal_retile.py -v -r bilinear -levels 4 -ps 6144 6144 -co "TILED=YES" -co "BLOCKXSIZE=256" -co "BLOCKYSIZE=256" -s_srs  EPSG:3734 -targetDir aerial_2011 --optfile list.txt

Don’t be afraid of big block sizes. Bump your memory up in your application container, stop worrying and learn to love the larger tif. I keep my total number of output tifs to no more than 2000, where I start to see performance issues in my implementation.
Also, give the image pyramid code a break. After retiling, do this:

mkdir 0
mv *.tif 0/.