[GENERAL] temporarily disable autovacuum on a database or server ?

I've run into a performance issue, and I think autovacuum may be involved.

does anyone know if its possible to temporarily stop autovacuum without a server restart ?

It seems that it either requires a server restart, or specific tables to be configured.

Several times a day/week, I run a handful of scripts to handle database maintenance and backups:

    * refreshing materialized views
    * calculating analytics/derived/summary tables and columns
    * backing up the database (pg_dumpall > bz2 > archiving)

These activities have occasionally overlapped with autovacuum, and the performance seems to be affected.