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.