Is there a way to improve YouTube performance on the iPad? I stream a lot of videos on my iPad. Vimeo, stuff on Apple.com, and more. The place where I consistently have a problem though, is YouTube. On a video such as this embed on Devour, about 10 seconds or so of content will play, and then playback will stop for 30-60 seconds as content buffers. Is there anything I can do to troubleshoot this, or better yet fix it?

For starters, I'm using my ISP's DNS server, as not doing so has led to problems with streaming from Apple and Netflix.
With business class cable (10 to 30 Mb/s), even HD videos are basically instant on and play through completely. It's more a matter of selecting a smaller stream size by picking your web site or setting a preference if you can't getting a wider pipe to the internet.

Latency isn't a big issue with streaming video - lots and lots of bandwidth is the major factor you can influence. Your mention of DNS is very important for things like Apple, Netflix, Google (YouTube) and others that set up content delivery networks to send you the files from a data center closest to your internet provider.

Streaming takes little RAM and the CPU is barely involved in video as the GPU handles the vast majority of that specialized task.

The iPad is capable of huge bandwidth on 802.11n networks so it's not something you have to fix or tweak on the iPad end of things...