The balanced homodyne detector for continuous-variable quantum memory is improved, and a fast response balanced homodyne detector for real-time measurement of amplitude and phase quadrature components of short pulsed optical signals is obtained. By using the circuits without capacitors and the photodiodes with a high quantum efficiency and a low capacitance, the response time of 65 ns for this balanced homodyne detector is obtained. The signal-to-noise ratio is higher than 12 dB at 2.5 MHz when a laser with a power of more than 100 μW and a wavelength of 795 nm is incident, and the corresponding saturation power is 6.8 mW. This balanced homodyne detector can be applied in the continuous-variable quantum memory and the quantum network, and so on.