Multitasking on iPod Touch 4G, running iOS 6.1.2, nearly impossible. Opened, background apps do not seem to stay in memory and must "reload" every time I switch back to them. Also, intense battery drain (imo).

Question

Let's say I'm playing Words with Friends, and also Angry Birds. I may want to go back and forth between the two. When I do so, the app that was in the background needs to reload again. There is no quick access or ability to quickly resume where I left off. And the reloading means that the app restarts from its opening screens...so if I was working on a level, I have to start all over again. And quite often, a game like Angry Birds will lag greatly when I first open it...moving almost in slow-motion.
I don't know if this is typical behavior when playing multiple games, or if I have an issue with my device. I've rebooted and even reset and restored, all to no avail.
There doesn't appear to be as much of an issue if I'm playing one game but also have the music player open, or Safari, Notes, Reminders, etc. Those will resume just fine, though there may be some lag when opening/re-opening them.
So I guess the problem seems to lie within 3rd party apps, and not the apps that are part of the iPod/iOS.
The other problem is battery drain. I do all of my music listening via Bluetooth, so I expect that to have a greater impact than if I were using plugged in headphones, and I have location services turned on. But I have most notifications turned off, all email accounts set to manual and not push, screen brightness turned down and auto brightness turned on, "ask to join networks" turned off, auto-lock is set to 2 minutes but I almost always turn off the screen immediately after setting up my music listening (since I do so at work), volume limit turned on, EQ turned off, sound check turned off,
With these settings, my battery can drain 20% or more within 10-15 minutes of game play. And these are not what I would consider memory intensive games--just Words and Angry Birds.
I've installed (and recently uninstalled) a couple of battery meters from the Apple Store as well--freebies. Carat, Battery Doctor, Battery HD, Battery Magic.
Carat and Battery Doctor seemed to offer the most pertinent and accurate information so the others were uninstalled long ago.
The Accelerate tab in Battery Doctor show the amount of memory in use, and the amount of available memory. The vast majority of the time, the memory in use is approximately 94%. I will occasionally choose to "accelerate" which supposedly frees up memory, but this "bump" lasts only a brief time and I'm not sure it's a great idea.
Even with absolutely nothing open or running, my used memory is generally still above 80%.
Carat, if anyone is familiar with it, shows a J-Score. My J-Score is 17, which means that my performance (according to Carat, anyway) is better than only 17% of the users who have Carat installed. In other words, 83% of people are getting better performance from their devices. It also has "battery hog" and "battery bug" sections. It doesn't detect any hogs or bugs.
I use my iPod Touch in rather limited ways. A typical day consists of approximately 5 hours of music listening via Bluetooth and 30 minutes to 1 hour of playing the aforementioned games. The occasional note and reminder, perhaps a brief check-in with the weather, and that's about it. And wifi is in use only when at home (there is no hotspot at work). Still, I need to charge it every day. I'd be keen to do more with the iPod if I could count on it to last more than a day.
I've read up on multiple forums and blogs for tips on prolonging a battery charge, and believe I've taken everything into account, and applied whatever I could. I've even reset the network settings and try to discharge the battery completely once a month (for supposed battery calibration).
I'm really hoping people can offer some suggestions or comments on whether this is typical behavior or if my battery is going, or even offer some additional tips.
With iOS 7 on the horizon, I'm hoping the upgrade will offer some resolutions (I've read there is better multitasking), but considering how weakly my device performs at this point, I'm not entirely convinced that an iOS upgrade will actually make any improvements.
Thanks a lot for reading.

Answer 1

No, the app does not have to completely restart. It gets shifted in its open state into storage. Similar to how a computer uses the hard disk when it has insufficient memory.
What complicates things is that sometimes memory does not get returned for reuse when you close an app. Thus yo should periodically double click the Home button and "delete" unnecessary apps from the multitasking dock and power off and then back on the iPod.