Is this happening in any scene? Even very simple?
I would check the following things:
1 - Make sure you are not running out of RAM. Such a freeze and then getting back to normal sounds like something related to RAM.
2 - Are you using the NVIDIA denoiser in IR? If so, try disabling it in Render Setup > Performance > Interactive Render > Denoise during rendering: none
3 - As the last step, you can try limiting your number of CPU threads for IR. You can change that in Render Setup > System > System Settings > Interactive rendering > # of threads override - you can set it to, for example, -4 to leave 4 threads available for other tasks than interactive rendering. The default value is -1.