You're doing web development, not building a supercomputer or trying to run your laptop as a high-performance server. That level of RAM is entirely unnecessary on a machine used for dev.
I disagree. Doing web dev, you could easily be running a browser with multiple tabs, web servers, db servers, and a handful of virtual machines all at the same time. The more RAM you have, the smoother it all runs. That is unless you like nice little pauses when you switch apps. If you have a 32 bit system, you should have 3GB if you can. 64 bit, throw in 6 or 8 GB. Memory's cheap.
