New Mac Mini is Slow, Upgrade RAM?

Question

I have a new Mac Mini.  Considering the cost, it is surprisingly slow.  It has 2GB of RAM and I think that may be the problem.  What sort of speed increase can I expect with an upgrade to 8GB?  The main problem seems to be swapping and switching between applications.
Is a RAM upgrade likely to fix this issue?

Answer 1

Wait, what?  Someone actually listened to advice from someone who has been developing software for 33 years!?
Yeah, RAM matters if you're doing something like video editing or 3D graphics or even some sort of heavy Photoshop.  Or if you are running numerous Chrome tabs at once or something like that.  But it would have to be heavy use indeed if you're running into slowdown with 8 gigs. 
What filesharing apps do, basically, is this: they have a buffer in memory, which might be a few megs.  They fill that buffer up, then they write that buffer to disk.  This is so it's not thrashing your disk all the time with tiny writes, but on the other hand, you wouldn't want it to download a gig before writing to disk: what if the computer crashed and you had to download all that data again?
Once you have 8 gigs, the MOST BANG FOR THE BUCK BY FAR is an SSD drive.  In fact, I have a Windows gaming machine with 4 gigs from 2007 that still runs most of what I need just fine, and an SSD just drove the performance out the roof.  You want a second larger drive on the thing, which is where you store non-speed-critical apps and all your data, and then a 100-200 gig SSD is where you put your OS and speed-critical apps, and loading it from there is far far faster than off of a conventional hard disk.  This isn't something you'd want to install yourself on a Mac Mini though.
Cheers!