The main goal of Project JXTA is to provide a peer-to-peer application framework based on a standard set of generic peer-to-peer protocols, independent of any particular platform or language. In spite of its recent popularity, the performance characteristics of the communication layers of JXTA are not well understood, though there is a general sentiment of inadequate performance. This paper examines the performance of the three JXTA communication layers: the JXTA sockets, JXTA pipe service and JXTA endpoint service. Round-trip time benchmarks are performed to evaluate the bandwidth and latency of each of the communication layers over both a Fast-Ethernet and a Myrinet network using the Java implementation of the JXTA protocols. The results show that, although the JXTA communications exhibit high latency, the Java binding of JXTA is able to reach the throughput of Java sockets. Very interesting results were obtained for benchmarks performed on high-performance Myrinet networks, where two out of the three JXTA communication layers were still able to achieve throughputs in excess of 1 Gb/s.