This is unfortunately normal (over a minute is more than what I experience but I assume it can vary depending on your hardware).
You are suffering of one of Julia’s most known pain points. In short: Julia is a compiled language, but compilation occurs the first time you run a function. With huge and complex codes like that of Makie, this first compilation takes a very long time (other plotting packages suffer from this because it is a very complex process). This problem is commonly known in the community as the “Time To First Plot” problem, but it can affect any type of program, not only the plotting ones.
Because julia does not save compiled code, when you start a new session, everything has to be compiled again.
1.- I know Simon (the main developer at Makie) is working on some refactoring of the code to make it a little more efficient but there is so much going on that it is difficult to know when things will change.
2.- A way of saving a compiled state is by creating a julia image that includes the compile code from Makie, check Home · PackageCompiler . However, Makie gets a lot of updates very frequently, so I don’t necessarily think this is the greatest of ideas.
3.- What most people do is try to keep your sessions open for a long time to try and mitigate the recompilation of all packages.