What can cause Neo4j to hang for around 3-5 minutes?

I'm regularly making cypher queries to insert data in to Neo4j.

Every now and then Neo4j will hang for around 3-5 minutes, and I'm not able to run any queries against the database.

What usually causes this?

I've checked debug.log and I haven't found any information on what's causing Neo4j to hang. I thought it might be something to do with some sort garbage collection, but I have increased the heap size greatly and it doesn't seem to have had much of an effect.

For what it's worth, Neo4j doesn't seem to be doing any CPU-intensive during this time.

Is there anywhere else I can look to find out what might be causing Neo4j to hang for 3-5 minutes every 30 minutes or so?