# Low latency - Temporal feature

> Discover how Temporal's design and features ensure low latency for your applications.

Temporal Cloud provides features that significantly reduce latency compared to self-hosted instances, making your applications faster, more performant, and more efficient.
In the world of modern applications, low latency is crucial for ensuring minimal delay in Workflow Executions.
This low-latency architecture ensures rapid Workflow Execution and responsiveness, critical for time-sensitive applications and high-performance systems.

Temporal Cloud's custom persistence layer incorporates three key components that contribute to low latency:

- **Better Sharding:** Distributes load across multiple databases, preventing bottlenecks.
  Enables independent resizing, improving scalability and handling high-traffic events without delay.
- **Write-Ahead Log (WAL):** Aggregates updates before writing to the database, reducing write latency.
  Stores writes in an append-only format, reducing latency and database size by batching updates before writing to the database.
- **Tiered Storage of Workflow Event History:** Offloads completed Workflow Event Histories, improving database efficiency.

Temporal Cloud provides lower latency, making it suitable for latency-sensitive, large-scale, or business-critical applications.

**Related:**

- [Exploring Temporal Cloud Automation Features](https://temporal.io/blog/exploring-temporal-cloud-automation-features)
- [High Availability and Disaster Recovery with Temporal Cloud](https://temporal.io/blog/high-availability-and-disaster-recovery-with-temporal-cloud)
- [Higher throughput and lower latency: Temporal Cloud’s custom persistence layer](https://temporal.io/blog/higher-throughput-and-lower-latency-temporal-clouds-custom-persistence-layer)
- [How to Migrate Your Self-Hosted Service to Temporal Cloud](https://temporal.io/blog/how-to-migrate-your-self-hosted-service-to-temporal-cloud)
- [Scaling your self-hosted instance](https://temporal.io/blog/scaling-temporal-the-basics)
- [Benchmarking Latency: Temporal Cloud vs. Self-Hosted Temporal](https://temporal.io/blog/benchmarking-latency-temporal-cloud-vs-self-hosted-temporal)
- [Temporal Cloud’s Latency SLO](https://docs.temporal.io/cloud/service-availability#latency)
- [Replay Conference Talk: Custom Persistence Layer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQv9ot-jB6o&list=PLl9kRkvFJrlREHL7fiEKBWTp5QuFeYS2r&index=5)