title: mclapply not using multiple cores
body: <p>I'm trying to process a bunch of csv files and return data frames in R, in parallel using <code>mclapply()</code>. I have a 64 core machine, and I can't seem to get anymore that 1 core utilized at the moment using <code>mclapply()</code>. In fact, it is a bit quicker to run <code>lapply()</code> rather than <code>mclapply()</code> at the moment. Here is an example that shows that mclapply() is not utilizing more the cores available: </p>
  
  <pre><code>library(parallel)
  
  test &lt;- lapply(1:100,function(x) rnorm(10000))
  system.time(x &lt;- lapply(test,function(x) loess.smooth(x,x)))
  system.time(x &lt;- mclapply(test,function(x) loess.smooth(x,x), mc.cores=32))
  
  user  system elapsed
    0.000   0.000   7.234
  user  system elapsed
    0.000   0.000   8.612
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there some trick to getting this working? I had to compile R from source on this machine (v3.0.1), are there some compile flags that I missed to allow forking? <code>detectCores()</code> tells me that I indeed do have 64 cores to play with...
   Any tips appreciated!</p>