The automatic production of performance models of software products can encourage software designers to include performance validation in their best practices. The incorporation of methods for automatic production can also be of interest of CASE tool vendors to improve the capabilities of their commercial software development environments. This paper deals with a method that introduces a systematic approach towards the automatic production of performance models of web applications (i.e. software applications run on web platforms). The method takes in input two sets of data, the description of the platform architecture (a general view of the system platform and a detailed view of the packet flow in the platform itself) and a set of data that describes the workload imposed on the platform by the application. The produced model is an extended queueing network ready to be used by conventional evaluation tools to derive predictions on the performance of the software applications. An example is given of the method application, in which predictions of the performance of the application are obtained versus various combinations of the processing powers of the interacting hosts. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.