8GB RAM isn’t a small amount (though by no means a lot). As far as RAM usage goes, the amount you need will scale with project+dependencies size, so for smaller projects, it shouldn’t be a problem at all.

8GB RAM doesn’t tell us about the rest of your system though. What CPU do you have? Is your storage slow? Performance is affected by a lot of factors. A slow CPU will naturally run programs slower, fewer hardware threads means less running in parallel, and slower storage means that reading incremental build data and writing it could be a bottleneck.

8 GB is a really small amount. Even phones have had that much RAM for several years. The average desktop I built in 2012 had 16 GB of RAM.

Plenty of modern computers only come with a small amount of RAM, because most people only need a small amount, but 8 GB is still a small amount.

“Small amount” is relative here. Not everybody needs to play Battlefield 6.

For just programming, 8GB is way more than enough. Even my old work laptop had only 8GB and the issues didn’t show up until I had multiple Office products + Teams + a browser open, not from any of my dev software.