4gb to 8gb ram:  Big help for LR?

I am running LR 4.1 RC2 on my Win7 64-bit 17.3" laptop.  Here are the basic specs:
i3-330M 2.26ghz, 4gb, 500gb hd, 17.3" 1600x900 screen, Intel graphics (with latest driver)
Fortunately, I have not had the terrible performance problems that some people report, but it is still somewhat sluggish.  Occasionally, even when I am not doing anything the ram usage will go from 450-550mb up to about 2gb for no apparent reason.  Also, the cpu usage will go up.  It only does this from time to time, but something is going on in the background.  Maybe some of the times it is building previews in the background, but that is just a guess.  Also, I discovered that any use of luminance NR really slows things down,.  Now I wait until the last step before exporting an image to do that so that it doesn't interfere while working on that image in the develop module.
My laptop works well and except for LR is fast enough.  I am wondering if going to 8gb would be the biggest bang for the buck change I could make for LR?  Often that is the case, but looking at the task manager I usually have quite a bit of memory available, although when LR is really busy like exporting an image to a resized jpeg file the memory of the PC can be up to 95% usage.  That drops down though when LR is done.  The raw files I am working with are from 16mp and 18mp cameras and I don't do batch processing, just one photo at a time.
This laptop is 2 years old, but still running fine so I would only get a newer one with a faster cpu and more ram if I really thought it would help quite a bit -- or this one develops problems.  Changing from 4gb to 8gb though is relatively inexpensive.  What are your thoughts?  Thank you.

I agree with your statement that 20 GB is probably ample for caching up to 40,000 raw files in LR4 and LR3.6 (see why below). Even using large 21Mp raw files that will hold up to 33,333 images before over-flow (20,000/0.6).
I know this is going off topic, but I'm sure it's of interest. I also thought that LR4.1 PV2012 stores different ACR cache information than LR3.6 PV2010. What is interesting is that the "file size" of LR3.6 PV2010 created ACR cache files are identical in size to LR4.1 P2012 created files. Below is a screen shot showing a purged cache snapshot for three (3) Canon 5D2 MKII 21Mp CR2 raw files processed first in LR3.6, and then in LR4.1 in the same order.
Cache0000000001.dat = Picture 1 in LR3.6 (530KB)
Cache0000000002.dat = Picture 2 in LR3.6 (608KB
Cache0000000003.dat = Picture 3 in LR3.6 (590KB)
Cache0000000004.dat = Picture 1 in LR4.1 (530KB)
Cache0000000005.dat = Picture 2 in LR4.1 (608KB)
Cache0000000006.dat = Picture 3 in LR4.1 (590KB)
What is more interesting is that the ACR cache .dat files are not being updated after making multiple changes to the images in LR3.6 and/or LR4.1 Develop module, only the 1 KB 'Index.dat' file is updated. I had always thought that changes made in the Develop module were updated in the ACR cache, but apparently that's not the case. I went back and hit 'Auto Tone' on each of the pictures, with no change even after zooming in to 100% on each picture. I also tried switching to the Library module and back to the Develop module, hitting 'Reset' on image, and repeating the same 100% viewing. You can see below that the 'Date Created' for the .dat image files is same as the 'Date Modified' (i.e. NOT modified), only the tiny 1KB 'Index.dat' is updated.
Double click on the picture to see full-size:

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