Mike Spencer compares lapply (single core and its multi-core version) versus a for loop in R:
But how fast were they? Can we get faster? Thankfully R provides `system.time()` for timing code execution. In order to get faster, it makes sense to use all the processing power our machines have. The ‘parallel’ library has some great tools to help us run our jobs in parallel and take advantage of multicore processing. My favourite is `mclapply()`, because it is very very easy to take an `lapply` and make it multicore. Note that mclapply doesn’t work on Windows. The following script runs the `read_clean_write()` function in a for loop (boo, hiss), lapply and mclapply. I’ve run these as list elements to make life easier later on.
It’s interesting reading, particularly because I had expected lapply to do a little bit better. Also interesting is the relative overhead cost of mclapply in this scenario: going from 1 core to 4 cut the time to approximately 1/3, not 1/4.