How do the underlying architectures of Catalyst, DBOS, and Inngest influence per-step latency for agent workflows that interact with external services, beyond just cold-start effects?

Architecture impacts per-step overhead. Catalyst’s sidecar model avoids serverless cold starts but introduces IPC latency. DBOS’s transactional engine incurs database commit overhead per step. Inngest’s serverless runtime may add initialization delays for container spawn, mitigated by provisioned concurrency. None eliminate latency completely; the magnitude depends on workload and infrastructure, so always benchmark in your environment.