One of the major problems in building large-scale distributed systems is to anticipate the performance of the eventual solution before it has been built. This problem is especially germane to Internet-based e-business applications, where failure to provide high performance and scalability can lead to application and business failure. The fundamental software engineering problem is compounded by many factors, including individual application diversity, software architecture trade-offs, COTS component integration requirements, and differences in performance of various software and hardware infrastructures. In this paper, we describe the results of an empirical investigation into the scalability of a widely used distributed component technology, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB). A benchmark application is developed and tested to measure the performance of a system as both the client load and component infrastructure are scaled up. A scalability metric from the literature is then applied to analyze the scalability of the EJB component infrastructure under two different architectural solutions.