# Memory and speed
We present some techniques and ideas to optimize 🤗 Diffusers _inference_ for memory or speed.
|
| Latency
| Speedup
|
| original
| 9.50s
| x1
|
| cuDNN auto-tuner
| 9.37s
| x1.01
|
| autocast (fp16)
| 5.47s
| x1.91
|
| fp16
| 3.61s
| x2.91
|
| channels last
| 3.30s
| x2.87
|
| traced UNet
| 3.21s
| x2.96
|
obtained on NVIDIA TITAN RTX by generating a single image of size 512x512 from the prompt "a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars" with 50 DDIM steps.
## Enable cuDNN auto-tuner
[NVIDIA cuDNN](https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn)Â supports many algorithms to compute a convolution. Autotuner runs a short benchmark and selects the kernel with the best performance on a given hardware for a given input size.
Since we’re using **convolutional networks** (other types currently not supported), we can enable cuDNN autotuner before launching the inference by setting:
```python
import torch
torch.backends.cudnn.benchmark = True
```
### Use tf32 instead of fp32 (on Ampere and later CUDA devices)
On Ampere and later CUDA devices matrix multiplications and convolutions can use the TensorFloat32 (TF32) mode for faster but slightly less accurate computations. By default PyTorch enables TF32 mode for convolutions but not matrix multiplications, and unless a network requires full float32 precision we recommend enabling this setting for matrix multiplications, too. It can significantly speed up computations with typically negligible loss of numerical accuracy. You can read more about it [here](https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/v4.18.0/en/performance#tf32). All you need to do is to add this before your inference:
```python
import torch
torch.backends.cuda.matmul.allow_tf32 = True
```
## Automatic mixed precision (AMP)
If you use a CUDA GPU, you can take advantage of `torch.autocast` to perform inference roughly twice as fast at the cost of slightly lower precision. All you need to do is put your inference call inside an `autocast` context manager. The following example shows how to do it using Stable Diffusion text-to-image generation as an example:
```Python
from torch import autocast
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained("CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4", use_auth_token=True)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")
prompt = "a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars"
with autocast("cuda"):
image = pipe(prompt).images[0]
```
Despite the precision loss, in our experience the final image results look the same as the `float32` versions. Feel free to experiment and report back!
## Half precision weights
To save more GPU memory, you can load the model weights directly in half precision. This involves loading the float16 version of the weights, which was saved to a branch named `fp16`, and telling PyTorch to use the `float16` type when loading them:
```Python
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4",
revision="fp16",
torch_dtype=torch.float16,
use_auth_token=True
)
```
## Sliced attention for additional memory savings
For even additional memory savings, you can use a sliced version of attention that performs the computation in steps instead of all at once.
Attention slicing is useful even if a batch size of just 1 is used - as long as the model uses more than one attention head. If there is more than one attention head the *QK^T* attention matrix can be computed sequentially for each head which can save a significant amount of memory.
To perform the attention computation sequentially over each head, you only need to invoke [`~StableDiffusionPipeline.enable_attention_slicing`] in your pipeline before inference, like here:
```Python
import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4",
revision="fp16",
torch_dtype=torch.float16,
use_auth_token=True
)
pipe = pipe.to("cuda")
prompt = "a photo of an astronaut riding a horse on mars"
pipe.enable_attention_slicing()
with torch.autocast("cuda"):
image = pipe(prompt).images[0]
```
There's a small performance penalty of about 10% slower inference times, but this method allows you to use Stable Diffusion in as little as 3.2 GB of VRAM!
## Using Channels Last memory format
Channels last memory format is an alternative way of ordering NCHW tensors in memory preserving dimensions ordering. Channels last tensors ordered in such a way that channels become the densest dimension (aka storing images pixel-per-pixel). Since not all operators currently support channels last format it may result in a worst performance, so it's better to try it and see if it works for your model.
For example, in order to set the UNet model in our pipeline to use channels last format, we can use the following:
```python
print(pipe.unet.conv_out.state_dict()["weight"].stride()) # (2880, 9, 3, 1)
pipe.unet.to(memory_format=torch.channels_last) # in-place operation
print(
pipe.unet.conv_out.state_dict()["weight"].stride()
) # (2880, 1, 960, 320) haveing a stride of 1 for the 2nd dimension proves that it works
```
## Tracing
Tracing runs an example input tensor through your model, and captures the operations that are invoked as that input makes its way through the model's layers so that an executable or `ScriptFunction` is returned that will be optimized using just-in-time compilation.
To trace our UNet model, we can use the following:
```python
import time
import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline
import functools
# torch disable grad
torch.set_grad_enabled(False)
# set variables
n_experiments = 2
unet_runs_per_experiment = 50
# load inputs
def generate_inputs():
sample = torch.randn(2, 4, 64, 64).half().cuda()
timestep = torch.rand(1).half().cuda() * 999
encoder_hidden_states = torch.randn(2, 77, 768).half().cuda()
return sample, timestep, encoder_hidden_states
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4",
# scheduler=scheduler,
use_auth_token=True,
revision="fp16",
torch_dtype=torch.float16,
).to("cuda")
unet = pipe.unet
unet.eval()
unet.to(memory_format=torch.channels_last) # use channels_last memory format
unet.forward = functools.partial(unet.forward, return_dict=False) # set return_dict=False as default
# warmup
for _ in range(3):
with torch.inference_mode():
inputs = generate_inputs()
orig_output = unet(*inputs)
# trace
print("tracing..")
unet_traced = torch.jit.trace(unet, inputs)
unet_traced.eval()
print("done tracing")
# warmup and optimize graph
for _ in range(5):
with torch.inference_mode():
inputs = generate_inputs()
orig_output = unet_traced(*inputs)
# benchmarking
with torch.inference_mode():
for _ in range(n_experiments):
torch.cuda.synchronize()
start_time = time.time()
for _ in range(unet_runs_per_experiment):
orig_output = unet_traced(*inputs)
torch.cuda.synchronize()
print(f"unet traced inference took {time.time() - start_time:.2f} seconds")
for _ in range(n_experiments):
torch.cuda.synchronize()
start_time = time.time()
for _ in range(unet_runs_per_experiment):
orig_output = unet(*inputs)
torch.cuda.synchronize()
print(f"unet inference took {time.time() - start_time:.2f} seconds")
# save the model
unet_traced.save("unet_traced.pt")
```
Then we can replace the `unet` attribute of the pipeline with the traced model like the following
```python
from diffusers import StableDiffusionPipeline
import torch
from dataclasses import dataclass
@dataclass
class UNet2DConditionOutput:
sample: torch.FloatTensor
pipe = StableDiffusionPipeline.from_pretrained(
"CompVis/stable-diffusion-v1-4",
# scheduler=scheduler,
use_auth_token=True,
revision="fp16",
torch_dtype=torch.float16,
).to("cuda")
# use jitted unet
unet_traced = torch.jit.load("unet_traced.pt")
# del pipe.unet
class TracedUNet(torch.nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.in_channels = pipe.unet.in_channels
self.device = pipe.unet.device
def forward(self, latent_model_input, t, encoder_hidden_states):
sample = unet_traced(latent_model_input, t, encoder_hidden_states)[0]
return UNet2DConditionOutput(sample=sample)
pipe.unet = TracedUNet()
with torch.inference_mode():
image = pipe([prompt] * 1, num_inference_steps=50).images[0]
```