As more third-party software components are available in the commercial market, more people begin to use the component-based software engineering approach to developing component-based programs. Since most e- business and e-commerce application systems are net-centered distributed systems, customers usually have very restricted system performance requirements. Hence, performance testing and evaluation of software components becomes a critical task for component-based software. Although a lot of research efforts have been devoted to analysis and design methods of component-based software, only a few research papers address the issues and systematic solutions to performance testing and measurement for modern components. This paper proposes a systematic solution and environment to support performance measurement for software components. The objective is to provide a plug-in-and-measure approach to evaluate component performance, including functional speed, throughput, availability, reliability and resource utilization. It reports the development effort on constructing a distributed performance evaluation environment for software components based on a set of well-defined performance evaluation metrics and techniques. In addition, some application examples and case study results are reported.