Supporting uninterrupted services for distributed soft real-time applications is hard in resource-constrained and dynamic environments, where processor or process failures and system workload changes are common. Fault-tolerant middleware for these applications must achieve high service availability and satisfactory response times for client applications. Although passive replication is a promising fault tolerance strategy for resource-constrained systems, conventional client failover approaches are non-adaptive and load-agnostic, which can cause system overloads and significantly increase response times after failure recovery. This paper presents four contributions to the study of passive replication for distributed soft real-time applications. First, it describes how our Fault-tolerant Loadaware and Adaptive middlewaRe (FLARe) dynamically adjusts failover targets at runtime in response to system load fluctuations and resource availability. Second, it describes how FLARe’s overloa...