I started to look at ways to improve times of certain very parallel tasks and thought that foreach should be a valid candidate to do the job.
So, i opened foreach tutorial by Steve Weston and started timing examples from it. First example from tutorial is 


>system.time(for(i in 1:100000) sqrt(i))

   user  system elapsed 
   0.06    0.00    0.06 
> system.time(foreach(i=1:100000) %do% sqrt(i))
   user  system elapsed 
 102.37    0.21  103.38 

Hmm, 1700 time slower?

second example is 
> system.time(x <- exp(1:1000000))
   user  system elapsed 
   0.34    0.03    0.42 
>system.time(x <- foreach(i=1:1000000, .combine='c') %do% exp(i))


I stopped it at 958 seconds, didn't have enough patience -- it basically seems that foreach  slows down this one down naive  by more than 2000 times. I must be  doing something very wrong. Am i supposed to set some environment variables before it works properly? I am running 64bit R on win7 dual core 2.27GHZ CPUs and 4GB memory laptop.
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