[dfinlay]

My advice is to follow these steps:

1. Wrote to disk the entire payload actually required/retrieved for the user to be both authenticated and invoke meaningful business logic.

2. Compress each component in a manner representative of the transfer medium. Save them in a separate directory tree as the uncompressed data.

2a. If you aren't using any compression in your payload, apologize to your users and start using it. Return to Step 1.

3. From here you can use standard filesystem tools to view payload composition by media type, compressibility, etc.

4. Identify the largest consumers of space in the payload and research how to reduce their size.

5. Implement reductions identified in research.

These steps should really be all you need in most scenarios.