{"slug": "model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage", "title": "Model download freezing at exact percentage", "summary": "A model download from Hugging Face freezes at a specific percentage due to a bug in the Xet-aware fetch/reconstruction path, as demonstrated by a Colab experiment. Disabling Xet with HF_HUB_DISABLE_XET=1 allows the download to proceed past the 2 GB region, indicating the issue is not a truncated file but a Xet-specific failure. The problem is tracked in xet-core issue #896.", "body_md": "Nice. I also ran a small Colab experiment on my end:\n\nUsing a fresh Colab Free runtime, I could reproduce a no-progress state while downloading the same `model.safetensors`\n\nfrom [ juiceb0xc0de/bella-bartender-gemma-e4b](https://huggingface.co/juiceb0xc0de/bella-bartender-gemma-e4b).\n\nThe most useful result was not just that it stalled again, but that the same file **passed the reported 2 GB region when I explicitly disabled Xet**.\n\n| Test branch | Observed result |\n|---|---|\nPublic GPT-2 control with `hf-xet 1.5.1` |\nCompleted normally |\nTarget with `hf-xet 1.5.1` , default settings |\nStopped making progress |\n| Target with sequential reconstruction writes | Still stopped making progress |\nTarget with `hf-xet 1.5.2rc0` |\nFailed explicitly with a response-body decoding error instead of silently hanging |\n| Target with Xet disabled | Passed 2.5 GB before I intentionally stopped the test |\n\nThis makes a simple explanation such as “the model file is physically truncated at 2 GB” much less likely.\n\nMy current reading is:\n\nThe problem appears to be specific to the Xet-aware fetch/reconstruction path, or to an interaction that this path triggers, rather than a universally unreadable byte range in the backing file.\n\nThat is still a black-box inference, not a confirmed internal root cause.\n\nThe [ xet-core issue you opened, #896](https://github.com/huggingface/xet-core/issues/896), looks like the right place to continue. It now has a useful combination of:\n\nFor someone who only needs to retrieve the file, the most direct diagnostic fallback is:\n\n```\nHF_HUB_DISABLE_XET=1 \\\nhf download juiceb0xc0de/bella-bartender-gemma-e4b \\\n  model.safetensors \\\n  --repo-type model \\\n  --local-dir ./bella-bartender-gemma-e4b\n```\n\nHugging Face documents `HF_HUB_DISABLE_XET`\n\nas the switch that disables `hf-xet`\n\neven when the package is installed. The documentation also explicitly asks users who need to disable Xet to file an issue with diagnostics, which you have already done: [Hugging Face Hub environment variables](https://huggingface.co/docs/huggingface_hub/package_reference/environment_variables).\n\nI would treat this as a **temporary workaround and a path-isolation test**, not as a final fix:\n\n`AccessDenied`\n\nreports in the same time window.One important distinction: I would currently keep the direct-download `AccessDenied`\n\nproblem and this Xet reconstruction stall as **separate observations**. They may share a broader incident context, but my Xet run did not show the same bridge XML `403`\n\nas its immediate failure.\n\nThis now looks narrower than a generic network or corrupt-file problem:\n\n`1.5.2rc0`\n\nexposes an explicit response-body decoding failure instead of the same silent wait;I would therefore treat the exact stopping region as a **reproducible clue**, while treating “2 GB buffer bug” as unconfirmed. The best-supported working description is an Xet-aware fetch/reconstruction failure, potentially involving incomplete range responses and a task that does not complete cleanly in `1.5.1`\n\n.\n\nThe existing diagnostic bundle plus this control/fallback comparison should give [ xet-core #896](https://github.com/huggingface/xet-core/issues/896) a fairly concrete starting point.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage", "canonical_source": "https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage/177785#post_5", "published_at": "2026-07-13 23:54:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-14 01:31:41.080122+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-infrastructure", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Hugging Face", "juiceb0xc0de/bella-bartender-gemma-e4b", "xet-core", "Colab"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/model-download-freezing-at-exact-percentage.jsonld"}}