How to tell if db repo is locked?

We're using SVN in some fairly large software packages. It's great!

Question: we're using a berkeley db as the back end of all of our
repositories. It has happened a few times that svn commands hang
(using svnserve as the client accessor agent -- svn+ssh kinds of
repository URLs) -- nothing seems to have any effect. In these
situations, we have nervously poked around checking everything, but
even most svnadmin commands hang (even "svn verify"). It's only when
we apprehensively invoke "svnadmin recover" that we get results (we are
nervous about "recover" because it's a fairly large repository and
there are disclaimers in the documentation about how it may take a
long, long time to run). "svn recovert" actually returns almost
immediately and then all commands stop hanging (both svn and svnadmin).

 From this behavior, we're assuming that there is some stale lock that
was left over that is causing all the commands to hang, and "svn
recover" is able to remove it. Is that a correct assumption?

If so, is there any way to tell that a repository has a stale lock and
it's "ok" to just "recover"? I ask because know this may shorten our
diagnostic time -- we'll be much less apprehensive about invoking "svn
recover" if we have an indication that it may just be a stale lock and
will run very quickly.

Many thanks!

-- 
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} jsquyres@lam-mpi.org
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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