Debugging Postgres?

Hello

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.