Apologies for a newbie question; I did search for an answer but came up empty…

I am finding that my Java app freezes completely for about five seconds when client.connect is called and eventually fails with connect exception and service exception.
(Connect to a live service works fine; I am concerned here with trying to establish initial contact to a server that may or may not be running)
Is there a less disruptive way to inspect a URI before calling connect?
Is there a common mistake I might be making that would lead to this behavior?

Thanks for the help.