Lesson: HuggingFace caps repository commits at 128 per hour

One upload call per file blew through the limit pushing the zoo, and two concurrent uploaders stalling on 429 looked like a hang rather than a limit.

Lesson: HuggingFace caps repository commits at 128 per hour

HuggingFace Hub limits repository commits to 128 per hour on the free plan. HfApi.upload_file is one commit per file, so pushing this project's LoRA zoo — four adapter sets, about 443 adapters, three to four files each — blows through it, and every uploader starts returning 429 Too Many Requests with a block of up to an hour.

Discovered 2026-08-29, when two uploaders ran concurrently against EternalRecursion/persona-lora-zoo-qwen35 and both stalled. It looked like a hang rather than a limit. The error names the remaining window, but the block is measured in tens of minutes.

How to apply it

Batch with api.create_commit(operations=[CommitOperationAdd(...), ...]) — one commit per group of adapters, not per file. Keep at least 33 seconds between commits, and make the retry backoff able to outlast a full hour (10 attempts x 600 seconds), because the hourly budget may already have been spent by an earlier run.

qwen35/upload_zoo_batched.py is the implementation, and the systemd unit zoo40-upload-adapters is described in /etc/systemd/system/ as "Upload the LoRA zoo to HuggingFace in batched commits (128 commits/hour cap)".

Related: Method lessons, Infrastructure.