Fancy Timer (CRT)

You're mid-batch, sixty frames deep, and you have no idea if you've been waiting two minutes or twenty. That's the whole pitch for the Fancy Timer Node: a real-time stopwatch that lives right on the canvas in big glowing digits, counting up while your workflow runs. It's a UI convenience, not a processing node - no inputs, no outputs, nothing to wire. You drop it in, queue a job, and watch MM:SS:ms tick up in the node's window until it finishes.

It's the kind of node you install for and then forget you have, until the day you're A/B testing samplers and realize you've been eyeballing wall-clock times that include the time it took you to go refill your coffee. Because the timer counts from when the graph starts executing, it gives you a truer per-run number than "glanced at my phone" ever did. Power users doing prompt sweeps or video batch work tend to keep one pinned in the corner of the graph for exactly this reason.

How it works

Under the hood there's basically nothing happening in Python - execute() just returns an empty dict. All the work is in the front-end JavaScript (js/Fancy_Timer_Node.js), which runs a shared global timer across every instance of the node on the canvas. The display is a classic stopwatch layout: minutes, seconds, and milliseconds in separate segments, green while the clock is running. It's display-only by design, which is why the info schema lists zero required inputs and zero outputs.

One genuinely nice touch: multiple Fancy Timer nodes all stay in sync because they share one clock. So you can drop one next to the sampler and another next to your save node and both show the same elapsed time, instead of drift.

Install

It ships in the CRT-Nodes pack, so you don't install this node alone:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/PGCRT/CRT-Nodes.git
pip install -r CRT-Nodes/requirements.txt

Then restart ComfyUI. Or just open ComfyUI Manager, search CRT-Nodes, and click install - the timer appears under CRT/Utils/UI in the node menu.

Troubleshooting

There's not much that can go wrong with a stopwatch. If the node shows up but the timer text never updates, your browser is almost certainly running a stale cached version of the pack's JavaScript - hard-refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R) and it'll come back. And if the node is missing entirely, the pack didn't load; check the ComfyUI console for an import error from one of CRT-Nodes' heavier dependencies (audio libs like librosa or pedalboard failing to import is the usual suspect). The pack is built to skip broken optional nodes and keep going, so a missing Fancy Timer usually means the whole pack crashed early.

Keep expectations honest: this is a nice-to-have, not a workflow tool. But when you're measuring sampling speed across a few dozen runs, having the number staring at you from the graph beats squinting at the server log every time.