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Abstract Considerable research effort has recently been devotedto the design of structured peer-to-peer overlays, a term we use to encompass Content-Addressable Networks(CANs), Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), and Decentralized Object Location and Routing networks (DOLRs).These systems share the property that they consistently map a large space of identifiers to a set of nodes in anetwork, and while at first sight they provide very similar services, they nonetheless embody a wide variety ofdesign alternatives. We present the case for developing application-driven benchmarks for such overlays, give amodel of the services they provide applications, describe and present the results of two preliminary benchmarks,and discuss the implications of our tests for application writers. We are unaware of other empirical comparativework in this area