doSNOW/foreach Performance Issues
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I have a loop which is loading decent size files around 5MB each and than running some computations on them.  I need to load 500-1000 of them.  Seems like an easy job for foreach.

I am doing this but the performance of doSNOW seems to be horrendous.

I found this post and this fellow seems to have had the same issues:

http://statsadventure.blogspot.com/2012/06/performance-with-foreach-dosnow-and.html

So a couple of questions.

1. Is there an alternative to doSnow?  I realize there is doMC but I am running windows.
2. Is doMC on linux that much faster than doSNOW?
3. Is there anyway to output to screen from a worker so I can at least get some sort of idea how my job is progressing.

Thank you in advance!