Java APIs

I have a many server to many client configuration using RMI. I am trying to make the system fault tolerant so that a single server crash will not cause issues in the client.

The problem that I am running into is that the RMI registry can't detect (to my knowledge) when a server is inactive, therefore the client will execute a remote method and it takes roughly 6 minutes to get a connection timeout response.

Is there perhaps a way to detect if the server (remote object creator) is no longer available? Or perhaps speed up the connection timeout?