Throttle download speed

[arch-btw]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When downloading a model, huggingface-cli opens many connections and completely maxes out the connection's bandwidth. Because of this, every other process doesn't have any bandwidth left.

Describe the solution you'd like

A command line flag that would allow you to set the maximum download speed.
For example:

huggingface-cli download --downrate 8M

To limit download speed to 8MB/sec.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I've tried bandwidth throttling apps such as trickle, but they don't work with huggingface-cli.

Additional context

I'm using Linux.

[Wauplin]

When downloading a model, huggingface-cli opens many connections and completely maxes out the connection's bandwidth. Because of this, every other process doesn't have any bandwidth left.

Hi @arch-btw, this is the case only if you have hf_transfer installed and enabled. hf_transfer is a rust-based package used to maximize the throughput by exploiting many processes in parallel, as you've seen. By default, huggingface-cli uses the simple-threaded requests library which doesn't lead to the situation you've described. I suspect that you have the HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER environment set to 1. See these docs for more details. If you want to disable it for a single command, you can do

HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=0 huggingface-cli download ...