In this paper, the authors examine Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) performance metrics which are mainly: the throughput, the energy consumption and the routing overhead. The reactive Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol was compared to the proactive Destination Sequenced Distance Vector DSDV according to the proposed performance metrics. The simulation was performed using the academic simulator for MANETs: GloMoSim under two main scenarios: the first is MANET scalability represented by number of mobile nodes and the second is users mobility represented by the mobile nodes maximum and minimum speeds and their pause time.