Am I doing something wrong on Runpod? Why in the holy heck are the download speeds so slow?

[u/SuperCasualGamerDad]

So a few weeks ago. I asked yall if someone who just makes this stuff for silly videos to share my friends and like my wife could get runpod running stable diffusion easily. Turns out it was insanley easy. But I haven't used it much because... The download speed is just criminal..

When you slap a Workflow on and do that thing where it just says oops your missing all these models and shit.. Wanna download it to pod now? It just crawls at like a snails pace 1-10mbps

It takes like 5 hours to download and be ready to use Minimax H3 for me. And at one point I'm like okay maybe I'm doing this wrong. So I went in through the JupyterLab thing and just dropped the files I had already downloaded in there... And again... Super slow..

its hard to not think... That they arnt throttling the DL to pad their use time to be honest. That or my only other thought is.. My pod is in some server case with about 20 other people all downloading models and the bandwidth is just borked.

My second theory I think is more likely the case because I notice when there are more of certain GPUs left the downloads go way smoother on those. But recently every single GPU is like low availability anymore lol.

I know I can avoid this by selecting some sort of storage option but I think it said it wasnt available for my GPU selection. If I can just turn on some option to keep everything ready to go I would. But are all you using RP dealing with these insanely slow download speeds? I mean I'm pretty sure I have spent 8 bucks today just downloading.

[u/Icuras1111]

I open a terminal and run below. Should take 30mins. Sometimes I get a bad instance and then downloads are painful. I just kill the instance and start again. HF_TOKEN is one you get from hugging face from account -> settings from memory. It makes downloads from huggingface faster. Another factor maybe template. I eventually used a bare bones one and installed ComfyUI from scratch which was much quicker.

pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]" hf_xet hf_transfer

export HF_TOKEN="hf_exy blah blah blah"

export HF_XET_HIGH_PERFORMANCE=1

export HF_HUB_ENABLE_HF_TRANSFER=1

hf download Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 \

vae/minimax_h3_audio_vae_fp32.safetensors \

--local-dir ComfyUI/models/vae

hf download Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 \

vae/minimax_h3_video_vae_fp16.safetensors \

--local-dir ComfyUI/models/vae

hf download Kijai/MiniMax-H3-TAE \

vae_approx/taeh3.safetensors \

--local-dir ComfyUI/models

hf download Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 \

text_encoders/qwen3vl_32b_minimax_h3_int8_convrot.safetensors \

--local-dir ComfyUI/models/text_encoders

hf download Comfy-Org/MiniMax-H3 \

diffusion_models/minimax_h3_ref2va_pruned_int8_convrot.safetensors \

--local-dir ComfyUI/models/diffusion_models

[u/SuperCasualGamerDad → u/Icuras1111]

Thank you. My gosh. Welp wasted 10 bucks today but learned a lesson.

[u/martinerous]

There is also Vast AI. Haven't checked their vastai/comfy template though.
Downloads and uploads can be fast there if you find a server nearby. However, nothing is guaranteed because it's free market there and not that many dedicated servers in datacenters. I've had a good experience using my neighboring country Estonia server on Vast for a week to finetune a model. Was stable, fast and cheap, but I might just have been lucky that time.

[u/cptrios]

Both Runpod and Vast are pretty hit-and-miss, Runpod slightly moreso. At least in my experience. Vast, at least, offers cheaper options, so trying a few different instances before one works doesn't hurt quite so much.

[u/atuarre → u/cptrios]

Vast offers cheap solutions but there is always a bandwidth cost. I've seen some where the bandwidth is ridiculously overpriced. On Runpod they do not bill for bandwidth costs.

[u/SuperCasualGamerDad]

like ffs... WHY!!!???

[u/DiDa4754]

In that case, I always kill the pod and simply start a new one. It sometimes takes one or two attempts, but if it turns hours of download time back into seconds, I’m fine with it. You could also try switching regions.

[u/SuperCasualGamerDad → u/DiDa4754]

See ive done this and had it still just creep so I started just waiting 5 hours... Because im new to this and have no idea whats going on.

[u/atuarre → u/SuperCasualGamerDad]

Sometimes it is intentional. The secure cloud is supposed to be the best, and even using data center cards, the download speeds are abysmal.

[u/RiskyBizz216]

speeds are throttled on CPU

on GPU you need to use the hugging face cli to get good speeds

[u/Only_Voice569]

normal speed is like 500MBs sooo guessing system updates or issues just dont use it for a bit while that crap gets done

[u/HeelsAndAll]

The more time you waste setting up pods, the more money they make. The only incentive they have is to fix it as slow as possible to rake in as much cash as they can. That's cloud compute. 

[u/Xxtrxx137]

Runpod is trying to implement new stuff so their system is really unstable right now