Abstract: The present invention pertains to multi-computer communication systems and the testing of computer systems in such systems. To reduce expenditures in time and money, a computer system can be performance tested for a multi-computer communications environment without the necessity of creating a communications network. Instead the computer system under test executes server and client code and transmits data packets according to one more standard network communications protocols (e.g., SSL). Thread execution time is tracked along with the number of transactions completed between the execution of server code and the execution of client code. With this data, the performance of the computer system acting solely as a server or as a client can be determined.