: The availability of enormous amounts of un-used computing power and data storage over the In-ternet makes the development of a globally distributed computing platform, called Overlay Computer (OC), at-tractive for the industry, the scientific community, and also the general user. In order to be effective, an OC must be equipped with tools for estimating and optimiz-ing the performance of applications. The tools must rely upon performance metrics of the key factors impacting performance of a distributed application, such as inter-connection latency and bandwidth, and available comput-ing power at the nodes. This paper first reviews the state-of-the-art on performance benchmarking approaches in globally distributed systems, including performance-conscious P2P systems. Later, it addresses the problem of developing a suite of microbenchmarking experiments aimed at providing the basic functionalities of a measurement tool for a P2P-based OC platform. Results show that such a measuring s...