Accurate, efficient and predictable performance assessment of distributed object models is necessary to make a founded decision about which model to use in a given application domain. This article presents a performance assessment framework for distributed object models. It presents two contributions to the study of distributed object performances: it defines the performance criteria for all important aspects of distributed object computing, including single and multi-client scenarios, and, it presents the high and low-level design of the framework and gives insights into implementation details for several important distributed object models, like CORBA, RMI and RMI-IIOP.