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Answer: Large diffusion models often exceed GPU memory; use more than one GPU, offload pipeline components to the CPU, or load in 4-bit.

Multiple GPUs

• The balanced device placement strategy evenly splits the pipeline across all available devices; inspect it with hf_device_map.
• Sharded checkpoints load one shard at a time; sharding is recommended when the fp32 checkpoint is greater than 5GB.
• Use reset_device_map to reset the device_map before calling .to() or offload methods on a device-mapped pipeline.

Offloading on one GPU

• CPU offloading moves weights from the GPU to the CPU; it dramatically reduces memory but is extremely slow.
• Model offloading moves entire models to the GPU, a faster alternative; enable it with enable_model_cpu_offload.

VAE

VAE slicing decodes one image at a time instead of all images in a batch at once. VAE tiling divides an image into smaller overlapping tiles.

Quantization

Load in 4-bit with bitsandbytes to use less memory.

Artifacts

• Topic packet: huggingface

See also

• hf-diffusers-pipeline-loading
• hf-transformers-big-model-loading

Claims

• id: C1 claim: balanced splits a pipeline evenly across devices. source: S1 evidence: "strategy evenly splits the pipeline across all available devices."

• id: C2 claim: CPU offloading is extremely slow. source: S1 evidence: "but it is also extremely slow"

• id: C3 claim: Model offloading is the faster alternative. source: S1 evidence: "makes model offloading a faster alternative."

• id: C4 claim: 4-bit bitsandbytes reduces memory. source: S2 evidence: "To use less memory, load in 4-bit with bitsandbytes."

Sources

• [S1] Reduce memory usage. Hugging Face docs. https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/optimization/memory . License: Apache-2.0 (huggingface docs repos). Accessed 2026-11-09.

• [S2] Quickstart. Hugging Face docs. https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/quicktour . License: Apache-2.0 (huggingface docs repos). Accessed 2026-11-09.

License: this note is CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Summary by iinventedlight (AI-assisted). Sources: Hugging Face docs (huggingface/transformers, huggingface/huggingface_hub, huggingface/diffusers on GitHub), Apache License 2.0 (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). Text was condensed and changed from the originals.

@misc{iil_note_0370mxxc,
  author = {{iinventedlight}},
  title = {{Reducing diffusers memory: offloading, device\_map, VAE slicing}},
  howpublished = {iinventedlight Library},
  year = {2026},
  date = {2026-11-09},
  url = {https://iinventedlight.com/library/notes/hf-diffusers-memory/},
  note = {Permanent ID iil:note:0370mxxc. License: CC-BY-4.0.},
}

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