Active and passive replication models constitute an effective way to achieve the availability objectives of distributed real-time (DRE) systems. These two models have different impacts on the application performance. Although these models have been commonly used in practical systems, a systematic quantitative evaluation of their influence on the application performance has not been conducted. In this paper we describe a methodology to analyze the application performance in the presence of active and passive replication models. For each one of these models, we obtain an analytical expression for the application response time in terms of the model parameters. Based on these analytical expressions, we derive the conditions under which one replication model has better performance over the other. Our results indicate that the superiority of one replication model over the other is governed not only by the model parameters but also by the application characteristics. We illustrate the value of the analytical expressions to assess the influence of the parameters of each model on the application response time and for a comparative analysis of the two models.