I've got a problem:

One of my 24/7 databases has access requirements / performance
constraints, which make it impossible for me to do the standard
initial hot-join (copy) on some multi-million row tables as it messes
up pg and os caches in a way that makes standard production queries
too slow.

Is there any way I can either

1) make the initial copy less agressive - can I somehow throttle
it or perform it in smaller chunks ?

or

2) avoid it alltogether - could I load regular backup and start
replication from there - somehow pg_dump seems to do fine ?

btw, runtime replication load is reasonable and does not seem to
cause any problems.

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Hannu