Hello,
short answer: it's automatic, internal and you can't control the period.
First, after power up the FPGA does a "power on reset" cycle.
Second, after that, it needs to be configured. There are several ways to configure an FPGA but in the most common one (Active Serial), the FGPA will automatically read it's configuration from a EPCS flash memory.
After the FPGA has been configured, the design is loaded and initialized.
a) Registers are initialized to zero, unless you specify otherwise*.
b) Memory blocks are initilized to zero, unless you specifiy otherwise.
* Actually, physical registers are always intialized to zero. But if you specify that a register has to be initilized to "1", the synthesis tools will use a technique called "not gate push back" to make the design behave as such.