— The General Internet Signaling Transport (GIST) protocol is currently being developed as the base protocol component in the IETF Next Steps In Signaling (NSIS) protocol stack to support a variety of signaling applications. In this paper we present our study on the protocol overhead and performance aspects of GIST. We quantify network-layer protocol overhead and observe the effects of enhanced modularity and security in GIST. We developed a first open source GIST implementation at the University of G¨ottingen, and study its performance in a Linux testbed. A GIST node serving 45,000 signaling sessions is found to consume small amounts of CPU and memory (on