If you're using a hosted service, or managing one, it's highly likely the applications are running slowly due to restricted resources. Allocating more memory to each user will improve the application responsiveness. Hosted solutions often don't meet the minimum memory or CPU requirements for a user workstation and usually cannot meet these requirements, so resource allocation is a balance between availability and usability. Within these environments, administrators should perform optimisation wherever possible, expecially where SQL Server is on the same server as used for RDS.