We discussed reducing your image size by about 700MB in this article:
But if you’re building your image from a host that has already fired up once then there’s likely to be a 2GB or 4GB file called sleepimage in /var/vm. This file is recreated on startup if it’s not present and needed. This will allow you to reduce image sizes by 2GB to 4GB. If you want to get rid of the file permanently on your imaging station you can run the following command:
pmset hibernatemode 0
Since you’ll likely want systems to use this feature run the command on your imaged clients with a 1 at the end to re-enable it.
Another item to look for is documentation. There is a lot of documentation located all over your systems. htdocs, docs, etc are great folders to look for to find various help files for Unix apps and sometimes entire web portals that you aren’t likely to use.
Of course, there’s Garage Band and all of the other iApps (and their supporting files in /Library/Application support) but you likely disabled these on install and will be deploying them as post-flight packages (if not let this serve as a nice little hint to do so).
At this point my base image is now 3.2GB. I have also removed some of the unused .kext files in this image and placed them into a stand-alone package, but I don’t know that I would recommend doing this in most environments unless you have one hardware build total.
