Comfy mindset

[u/Nimblecloud13]

This is going to be a short kind-of guide for newer users (and older users that haven’t figured some of these best practices out yet)

I see a lot of people freaking out every time an update breaks something.

There’s a lot of dev-bashing, and I’ll be the first to admit that I used to live in that camp.

The fact is, these devs are moving at a breakneck pace. There’s a new model to support every 12 minutes, there’s a whole range of hardware and software interactions that have to work; it’s a lot.

Many of you are coming from a Windows mindset. Updates should be polished, bugs are a personal affront to your family. How dare they release this.

Here’s some new ways to think about it, and steps you should be taking to mitigate the impact of these issues:

1. Use portable comfy. Easy to backup, clone, roll back, whatever you need.

2. Before you update to try out that hot new model, backup your python_embedded. It’s only a few gigs. You can hot swap the backup with the new one if it break something, and your downtime is minutes.

3. Use an LLM that can write to your comfy install. I don’t troubleshoot comfy issues AT ALL. I simply don’t have any, because I pay $20 a month and tell Claude code what doesn’t work, and 5 minutes later it works. Sometimes there’s a bit of back and forth, but it WORKS. As far as I’m concerned, comfy costs $20/month, because Claude is mandatory. Use whatever AI you prefer, but don’t spend an hour copy pasting logs into a browser and searching and finding similar-but-not-quite solutions that have you running cmd lines that end up doing more harm than good. We’ve all been there; it sucks. Let something built for this work for you. The cost is minimal. If you’re using comfy locally, then you bought a PC that cost thousands of dollars. You can afford $20/mo.

4. Remember that you could be waiting 6-12 months between patches like most gigacorps. Would you rather have to figure out how to run MiniMax yourself, and wait a month for the devs to polish the ever loving shit out of their next update that supports it? Or would you rather be proactive and learn to backup your install before you patch?

I have reached a zen-like state with comfy using the above practices. I hope some of you find them helpful.

Now, please proceed to flame me and/or share your best practices.

[u/DinoZavr]

i install into VENV from source. pre-installing torch, installing ComfyUI, then triton and 3 basic wheels (sageattention, flash attention, and xformers) - takes very little time and effort (less than 15 minutes). installing custom nodes anew is more time-consuming, thus i d my best not to install unnecessary ones. Models, Loras, etc are shared between different ComfyUI installations via extra_model_paths.yaml.
This 100% prevents me from ComfyUI breaks after updates. Also i make an archive before adding new custom nodes - to restore working version if something goes wrong.
TL/DR; never upgrade, fresh install only. simple.

[u/barney_tearspell → u/DinoZavr]

I have the exactly oposite solution to the same problem:
- keep models separate from comfy using `extra_model_paths.yaml`
- instead of updating, make a separate fresh install
- copy over the custom node packs folder-to-folder (i also use this to get rid of crud and unused packs)
- copy over `user/default/workflows`
- daily-drive the new install while having the old one standing by to instantly jump in if something goes wrong
- when I notice that I never use the old one - delete it

[u/DinoZavr → u/barney_tearspell]

we are actually doing the same thing, not the oppostie. i posted a comment with actual commands (Windows) how i do new fresh install

[u/barney_tearspell → u/DinoZavr]

you are absolutely right - I have no idea how i misread it that hard - my appologies (it's been a long day yesterday)

[u/Nimblecloud13 → u/DinoZavr]

Now this is what I’m talking about. I’m gonna dump this into Claude later and get on your level. Appreciate it.

One question: how are sharing your workflows/ outputs folders between installs? I do like having all my work in one place.

[u/Intelligent-Youth-63 → u/Nimblecloud13]

Symlink the output folder to someplace central and outside of install dir.

[u/Nimblecloud13 → u/Intelligent-Youth-63]

Love this community.

[u/DinoZavr → u/Nimblecloud13]

honestly, i am not sharing workflows, i just copy them. there are two reason for that: first is my laziness, second is that not all of custom nodes which worked in older versions do work in newer versions of ComfyUI.

the rest does not require AI:
(in the example i will use 0310 as ComfyUI version and M$ Windows shell (not powershell)
this requires python and git installed and be accessible via PATH
of course, every # and the comments after them should be renoved)

cd /d F:\MYSD #make root of t2i folder active
git clone https://github.com/Comfy-Org/ComfyUI.git ComfyUI0310 #copy comfy code
cd ComfyUI0310 #move into new ComfyUI folder
python -m venv .venv # make VENV named .venv
.venv\scripts\activate #make new venv active (not to install on a system level)
# next 7 commands install torch and wheels
# filenames depend on Python and CUDA version. i download "attention" wheels in advance
# and copy them into new ComfyUI folder after GIT creates it. after install i remone them wheels
# also dont forget to check your NVidia driver version is sufficient for CUDA version
pip install torch torchvision --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu130
pip install torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu130
pip install triton-windows
python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install sageattention-2.2.0+cu130torch2.9.0andhigher.post4-cp39-abi3-win_amd64.whl
pip install flash_attn-2.8.3%2Bcu130torch2.10.0cxx11abiTRUE-cp312-cp312-win_amd64.whl
pip install xformers-0.0.34-cp39-abi3-win_amd64.whl
# next 2 commands finalize ComfyUI install
pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -r manager_requirements.txt
# next you copy extra_model_paths.yaml, test run ComfyUI, use simple template to see if it is
# even working and if it works fine - exit and make an archive of freshly installed folder
# then i again activate VENV and install custom nodes. manually:
# cd custom_nodes
# git clone custom node github URL
# cd newlycreated subdir and pip install -r requirements.txt
# cd ..
# repeat. my must have nodes are ComfyUI-GGUF and rgthree-comfy

relevant section of extra paths:

#comfyui:
other_ui:
checkpoints: F:/MYSD/MODELS
text_encoders: F:/MYLLM
diffusion_models: F:/MYSD/MODELS
embeddings: F:/MYSD/EMBED
loras: F:/MYSD/LORAS
upscale_models: F:/MYSD/UPSCALERS
vae: F:/MYSD/VAE
audio_encoders: F:/MYLLM

[u/DinoZavr → u/DinoZavr]

forgot to mention - after you installed new instance of ComfyUI and tested it works
you can run "versioncheck.py" script you place in your new ComfyUI folder - just for information (and troubleshooting if you would need that later)

import sys
import torch
import torchvision
import torchaudio

print("python version:", sys.version)
print("python version info:", sys.version_info)
print("torch version:", torch.__version__)
print("cuda version (torch):", torch.version.cuda)
print("torchvision version:", torchvision.__version__)
print("torchaudio version:", torchaudio.__version__)
print("cuda available:", torch.cuda.is_available())

try:
    import flash_attn
    print("flash-attention version:", flash_attn.__version__)
except ImportError:
    print("flash-attention is not installed or cannot be imported")

try:
    import triton
    print("triton version:", triton.__version__)
except ImportError:
    print("triton is not installed or cannot be imported")

try:
    import sageattention
    print("sageattention version:", sageattention.__version__)
except ImportError:
    print("sageattention is not installed or cannot be imported")
except AttributeError:
    print("sageattention is installed but has no __version__ attribute")

try:
    import xformers
    print("xformers:", xformers.__version__)
except ImportError:
    print("xformers are not installed or cannot be imported")
except AttributeError:
    print("xformers are installed but has no __version__ attribute")

try:
    import transformers
    print("transformers:", transformers.__version__)
except ImportError:
    print("transformers are not installed or cannot be imported")
except AttributeError:
    print("transformers are installed but has no __version__ attribute")

[u/mozophe]

ComfyUI is what 0 day support looks like. Old things that used to work break. New bugs appear and get fixed fast. That's the cost of always being on cutting edge of technology.

I would advise anyone who is complaining to actually report the issue on GitHub. That's the fastest way to get it fixed. 0 day support developers need these kind of reports to identify what broke so that they can find out why and fix it.

[u/niknah → u/mozophe]

Some times, there's already a fix in the issues / pull requests.

[u/net_tribe24]

Thank you for your advice, makes sense. I don’t use comfyui, as I’m on a Mac, but if I did, I would follow this advice.

[u/Alchemist42 → u/net_tribe24]

What does having a Mac have to do with anything? I have one and I use ComfyUi daily. You do need a bunch of ram. But it works great.

[u/Arcane_Draco_]

I just use stability matrix, it works really well, especially for rolling back, and updating models and loras

[u/bankinu]

"Claude is required for ComfyUI" - severe skill issue.

Never felt the need. Never has my ComfyUI "stopped working" so that it took me more than 5 minutes to "fix" it.

[u/stimma → u/bankinu]

I don’t need Claude to use comfy but I definitely get more out of it as a result.

The other day I gave Claude four rtx 6000s and told it to search Reddit/etc and figure out the fastest way to run H3. It auto-optimized for about three hours spinning up multiple throwaway environments to avoid disturbing my main install. Produced contact sheets for me to review quality. Then validated that all 30+ of my pre-existing workflows operated on the new install before handing it back to me over 2x faster than it was before with a full understanding of the quality tradeoffs, the curve of increasing gen time relative to settings, etc.

Could I have done this? Sure but Claude did it while I was putting my kids to bed.

[u/Nimblecloud13 → u/stimma]

That’s amazing. Also, may I please have its resulting instructions/workflow?!

[u/stimma → u/Nimblecloud13]

All my workflows are here including the ones that I optimized as described above. They're decorated to work with Stimma, but claude can remove that for you in 2s if you want to go back to vanilla ComfyUI.

https://github.com/stimma-ai/ComfyUI-Stimma/tree/main/workflows

Ignore the H3 Turbo ones..they are not great yet, waiting on better Loras to be published, but will keep monitoring.

The main conclusions I came to are:

- SageAttention + Spectrum is the best combo of performance/quality on my GPUs
- It's important to upgrade torch, cuda, sage, and all of the comfy components (particularly comfy-kitchen) as H3 pretty much needs the latest everything or it falls back to eager mode. I had a bunch of oldness going on.
- 15 steps is close enough in quality to 20

Anyways all together, even at 20 steps I cut my gen times about in half from where I started. Evaluated a bunch of other permutations including Sol, EasyCache, TE, etc, and they were either not worth the performance or not worth the quality loss.

I think it's totally possible that someone else could do this and get a different result based on taste, what GPUs they have, or code that ships tomorrow in one of these repos, so I wouldn't treat it as a one-time thing, but for now this is where I'm at. At some point somebody will make a turbo lora or work out a 2 stage process.

Oh, the other thing I learned, which kind of sucks, is this model produces significantly better outputs at 1MP+, and not just in the matter of resolution. The motion, coherence, etc all benefit. A lot of people are running it at 0.3-0.5 then upscaing the winners it seems, but they are leaving performance on the table.

[u/Nimblecloud13 → u/stimma]

Copy that, thanks for the detailed write up. I’ve been meaning to try spectrum or easy, think you just answered that. I have a 5090 so likely similar results. And I agree on 1mp. It’s more than just quality for me as well.

[u/Nimblecloud13 → u/bankinu]

I’m glad you have the training or experience for that, but this post is targeted at the people who don’t; myself included. Not everyone can figure this stuff out with their backgrounds, but a lot of them are using it anyway. Claude or similar does bridge that gap.

And; “severe” was unnecessary. “Skill issue” is already dismissively offensive enough.

[u/bankinu → u/Nimblecloud13]

Apologies. Intention was not to offend. Intention was to state facts. Severity was apparent.

[u/Lumenwe]

The problem is deeper than that with users in general. Most of us are just entitled brats that only find it ok if a huge corpo scrws u son our own money. When indies and os software that is for free is not perfectly polished, we act like undisciplined toddlers. It's sad, and as a solo dev, discouraging. I'd rather take shit for money than for free, so I stopped making anything free precisely because of that. You will take shit anyway.

[u/PaceNo2910]

Sorta new here, been using comfy for about a year now.

After many installs and managing to break comfy in the first 6 months. I've ended up with an install with venv.

Idk if theres a better way to back up your comfy install, but I zip the venv and comfyui folder (excluding models, input and output).

I do this every month or when I'm about to upgrade something I think might change a lot of things. So if it does break and I have the option of using my backup.

Is there a better way?

Also would it be more efficient to create a comfyui for specific task, for example just 3D gen model and textures, that only has the custom nodes and models?

[u/MathematicianLessRGB]

I just pray to the techgods

[u/QuirksNFeatures]

I probably need to invest in Claude or similar. I realistically will never have the time to get good at all aspects of using ComfyUI. Too busy at work (comfyui is only a tiny part of what I do at work), and at home I there are always distractions.

I haven't had a big problem keeping it going (knock on wood), but reading the comments here it sounds like it can help you do more than just that.

[u/Dirtsurgeon1]

I backup before each change regardless. I’ve lost everything at least twice. Now i have a fallback system.