I don’t own an iPad, so forgive me if this information isn’t useful to you.
I often do work outside of work for friends and family. One thing I have been asked by two different people in the last two weeks is ‘Why is my iPad suddenly slow? Do I need a new one?”
I need to have a play, and sometimes research. In this case, both users had over 20 Safari tabs open, and more than 5 apps running in the background. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) restarting the device doesn’t clear these out.
Each time I come across this slowness, closing all tabs and apps seems to bring everything back to speed how they are used to it. Not sure if this is normal or not, but it seems a bit of a coincidence that both of these people have the same issue and I used the same solution.
I was going to link to a how to article here on Macworld, but I don’t agree with sites that insist on having auto-playing videos on their site. It really annoys me. Firstly, it consumes bandwidth, slows down loading, and I often middle click to open multiple tabs at a time; for me, I believe it speeds up my ability to find information as I can speed read sites and middle click to close a site that I deem not informative for my particular problem. Having multiple tabs open with irrelevant videos playing in the background is just not on.
http://ipad.about.com/od/ipad_tricks/ss/How-To-Close-All-Tabs-In-Safari-On-The-iPad.htm
http://www.wikihow.com/Close-iPhone,-iPad,-and-iPod-Touch-Apps