problem using rJava with parallel::mclapply

Dear all,

I got an issue trying to parse excel files in parallel using XLConnect, the
process hangs forever.
Martin Studer, the maintainer of XLConnect kindly investigated the issue,
identified rJava as a possible cause of the problem:

This does not work (hangs):
library(parallel)
require(rJava)
.jinit()
res <- mclapply(1:2, function(i) {
     J("java.lang.Runtime")$getRuntime()$gc()
     1
 }, mc.cores = 2)

but this works:
library(parallel)
res <- mclapply(1:2, function(i) {
 require(rJava)
 .jinit()
 J("java.lang.Runtime")$getRuntime()$gc()
 1
}, mc.cores = 2)

To cite Martin, it seems to work with mclapply when the JVM process is
initialized after forking.

Is this a bug or a limitation of rJava ?

Or is there a good practice for rJava clients to avoid this problem ?

Best,
Karl

P.S.

sessionInfo()

R version 3.0.1 (2013-05-16)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=C                 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.0.1

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]