@metrizable I noticed that Collab comes with a pre-populated default environment. We discourage that for many reasons, partly because it leads to unfortunate interactions when users want to install their own packages.
Admin: How to provide Julia to users? has some more information on that topic (HPC admins also have the initial desire to provide a pre-populated default environment)
I noticed that precompilation times are quite bad, the machines seem to be beefy enough so I wonder if the slow down is some unfortunate interaction with the file system?
Ideally one would be able to have a transparent cache for JULIA_DEPOT_PATH. (~/.julia) (That’s something we do on GitHub actions), and support for Project.toml?