what is the best way to optimize performance....
Spend money. LOL.
But really, as others have said, use less intensive layouts. AM itself is very light weight compared to other FEs. Some layouts and HQ videos used can tax your system resources. Hardware acceleration can help with video rendering but only if you make sure that your videos (and OS) can use it. Not using videos at all would make for a very light (but possibly boring) layout.
In short, use a layout that suits your hardware or spend money to buy better hardware. In this case money can fix it but is it needed or worth it?
P.S. To put layout performance into layman's terms (how much each of these effect your system will depend on your hardware)
1. if you search the layout.nut and see "surface" entries it will take a performance hit
2. if you look near the beginning of the layout.nut and see a lot of "fe.load_module" or "fe.do_nut" entries there will be a performance loss
3. if the layout.nut contains "shader", "blend", "blur" or "scanline" there's a performance drop