From Files to Chunks: Improving Hugging Face Storage Efficiency
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Jared Sulzdorf PRO
jsulz
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When the XetHub crew joined Hugging Face this fall,
@erinys
and I started brainstorming how to share our work to replace Git LFS on the Hub. Uploading and downloading large models and datasets takes precious time. That’s where our chunk-based approach comes in.
Instead of versioning files (like Git and Git LFS), we version variable-sized chunks of data. For the Hugging Face community, this means:
⏩ Only upload the chunks that changed.
🚀 Download just the updates, not the whole file.
🧠 We store your file as deduplicated chunks
In our benchmarks, we found that using CDC to store iterative model and dataset version led to transfer speedups of ~2x, but this isn’t just a performance boost. It’s a rethinking of how we manage models and datasets on the Hub.
We're planning on our new storage backend to the Hub in early 2025 - check out our blog to dive deeper, and let us know: how could this improve your workflows?
https://huggingface.co/blog/from-files-to-chunks
Instead of versioning files (like Git and Git LFS), we version variable-sized chunks of data. For the Hugging Face community, this means:
⏩ Only upload the chunks that changed.
🚀 Download just the updates, not the whole file.
🧠 We store your file as deduplicated chunks
In our benchmarks, we found that using CDC to store iterative model and dataset version led to transfer speedups of ~2x, but this isn’t just a performance boost. It’s a rethinking of how we manage models and datasets on the Hub.
We're planning on our new storage backend to the Hub in early 2025 - check out our blog to dive deeper, and let us know: how could this improve your workflows?
https://huggingface.co/blog/from-files-to-chunks
Post
1638
The Hugging Face Hub hosts over 1.5M Model, Dataset, and Space repositories. To scale to 10M+, the XetHub team (https://huggingface.co/xet-team) is replacing Git LFS with a new technology that improves storage and transfer capabilities with some future developer experience benefits to boot.
Thanks to @yuchenglow and @port8080 (for their analysis covering LFS usage from March 2022–Sept 2024), we now have insights into what we’re storing. Check out the Gradio app to explore:
- Storage growth over time
- File types over all repositories
- Some simple optimizations we're investigating
xet-team/lfs-analysis
Thanks to @yuchenglow and @port8080 (for their analysis covering LFS usage from March 2022–Sept 2024), we now have insights into what we’re storing. Check out the Gradio app to explore:
- Storage growth over time
- File types over all repositories
- Some simple optimizations we're investigating
xet-team/lfs-analysis
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