Error message: SSL SYSCALL error: Connection timed out

[Neil C]

I have a Rails 3.2 application with DataMapper against Postgres that has produced this error: 
Error message: SSL SYSCALL error: Connection timed out 

This seems to be a common problem with ActiveRecord and Postgres as described here: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/3392

However, I am curious how the DataMapper community believes this can be resolved.

Thanks.