Postgres timeouts?

I'm having an interesting issue with PGSQL. It seems that I'm
experiencing timeouts at various times. The servers are not busy and
have plenty of resources. The databases are ~50GB in size, the systems
typically have 8-12GB physical RAM, and the connections are low (less
than 15 at any given time).

The issue I'm seeing is that randomly I'm getting these pauses, or
stalls, while trying to simply connect to the database server(s) from
connected clients using the psql command line client. I cannot tell if
the server is even getting the request for service as they don't seem to
show up in the logs at the time the event is occurring, so I'm thinking
it's maybe a client-side issue.

Is there a good general starting place for debugging these types of
issues ?

-B.