Pages on iPad Hanging like Crazy

Pages on my iPad Air is hanging all the time. Several times very quarter-hour. On a short document. For 10/20/40 seconds! This doc not even synced to iCloud, although iCloud Deive turned on. (And iCloud Drive sharing not working at all from iOad, but a different topic.)

Very frustrating to have the primary Apple iWork app near unusable on a recent iPad. Microsoft Word exhibits none of this behavior, but I don't want to have to shift all my docs to Word.

Anyone else having this problem? Suggestions?