title: mclapply user time larger than elapsed time
body: <p>I am trying to use <code>mclapply</code> function of the <code>parallel</code> package in <code>R</code>. The function is assigning the values to sequence matrix by calculating log likelihood distance - a CPU-intensive operation. </p>
  
  <p>The resulting <code>system.time</code> values are confusing:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; system.time(mclapply(worksample,function(x){p_seqi_modj(x,worksample[[1]],c(1:17))}))
     user  system elapsed 
   29.339   1.242  18.581 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I thought that <code>elapsed</code> means aggregated time (<code>user</code>+<code>system</code>). What does the above result mean in this case and to what time should I orient myself? My unparallelized version takes less in <code>user</code> time and much more in <code>elapsed</code>.  </p>