Connection refused) while connecting to upstream

Hi,
I was wondering if someone could shed some light on an issue we are having in the log files, intermittently we are getting flooded with the below error messages.
We are just using NGINX as a reverse proxy and using Glass fish for the apache server, both on separate servers. I did some searching around and see allot of people that have this issue but nobody seems to comment on how they resolve it. I did see one poster where they referenced changing the nginx config files where there is a "local host" entry to the local host IP(127.0.0.1) instead and this seemed to help for several people.
Is there anyone that has had this problem and can comment on it? I am also checking logfiles in glassfish to see if we are hitting any limits and so far I am not seeing anything major, or that I can sync up with the same time frames we get these errors in the nginx log.

connect() failed (111: Connection refused) while connecting to upstream, client: IP, server: _, request: "GET /bandwidth/ HTTP/1.1", upstream: "http://IP address", host: " "

Thanks