I can't seem to get mclapply to use more than a single core. I have a 64
core server running Linux.

Fore example:

library(parallel)

test <- lapply(1:100,function(x) rnorm(10000))
system.time(x <- lapply(test,function(x) loess.smooth(x,x)))
system.time(x <- mclapply(test,function(x) loess.smooth(x,x), mc.cores=32))

gives me:

   user  system elapsed
  0.000   0.000   7.441
   user  system elapsed
  0.000   0.000   8.868

i.e. mclapply is taking longer than lapply(). What is going wrong here?

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