foreach performance

I'm noticing a huge performance hit when using foreach with doSNOW.? Any ideas on why the parallel loop runs ~8 times slower than?the same foreach run sequentially?
?

require(doSNOW)

Loading required package: doSNOW
Loading required package: foreach
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Loading required package: iterators
Loading required package: snow

cl = makeSOCKcluster(rep("localhost",3))
registerDoSNOW(cl)

system.time((

+ x = foreach(i=seq(1,5000)) %dopar% {
+???? arima.sim(n = 250, list(ar=c(0.8897, -0.4858), ma=c(-0.2279, 0.2488)),
+???????? rand.gen = function(n, ...) sqrt(0.1796) * rt(n, df = 5))
+ }
+ ))
?? user? system elapsed 
?? 4.46??? 0.22?? 50.27

system.time((

+ y= foreach(i=seq(1,5000)) %do% {
+???? arima.sim(n = 250, list(ar=c(0.8897, -0.4858), ma=c(-0.2279, 0.2488)),
+???????? rand.gen = function(n, ...) sqrt(0.1796) * rt(n, df = 5))
+ }
+ ))
?? user? system elapsed 
?? 6.25??? 0.01??? 6.27

system.time((

+ for (i in seq(1,5000)) {
+ x = arima.sim(n = 250, list(ar=c(0.8897, -0.4858), ma=c(-0.2279, 0.2488)),
+???????? rand.gen = function(n, ...) sqrt(0.1796) * rt(n, df = 5))
+ }
+ ))
?? user? system elapsed 
?? 2.76??? 0.00??? 2.76 


Dominic J. Pazzula
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dompazz at yahoo.com