Why does calling cache take a long time on a Spark

Question

I'm loading large datasets and then caching them for reference throughout my code. The code looks something like this:

val conversations = sqlContext.read
  .format("com.databricks.spark.redshift")
  .option("url", jdbcUrl)
  .option("tempdir", tempDir)
  .option("forward_spark_s3_credentials","true")
  .option("query", "SELECT * FROM my_table "+
                   "WHERE date <= '2017-06-03' "+
                   "AND date >= '2017-03-06' ")
  .load()
  .cache()

If I leave off the cache, the code executes quickly because Datasets are evaluated lazily. But if I put on the cache(), the block takes a long time to run.

From the online Spark UI's Event Timeline, it appears that the SQL table is being transmitted to the worker nodes and then cached on the worker nodes.

Why is cache executing immediately? The source code appears to only mark it for caching when the data is computed:

The source code for Dataset calls through to this code in CacheManager.scala when cache or persist is called:

  /**
   * Caches the data produced by the logical representation of the given [[Dataset]].
   * Unlike `RDD.cache()`, the default storage level is set to be `MEMORY_AND_DISK` because
   * recomputing the in-memory columnar representation of the underlying table is expensive.
   */
  def cacheQuery(
      query: Dataset[_],
      tableName: Option[String] = None,
      storageLevel: StorageLevel = MEMORY_AND_DISK): Unit = writeLock {
    val planToCache = query.logicalPlan
    if (lookupCachedData(planToCache).nonEmpty) {
      logWarning("Asked to cache already cached data.")
    } else {
      val sparkSession = query.sparkSession
      cachedData.add(CachedData(
        planToCache,
        InMemoryRelation(
          sparkSession.sessionState.conf.useCompression,
          sparkSession.sessionState.conf.columnBatchSize,
          storageLevel,
          sparkSession.sessionState.executePlan(planToCache).executedPlan,
          tableName)))
    }
  }

Which only appears to mark for caching rather than actually caching the data. And I would expect caching to return immediately based on other answers on Stack Overflow as well.

Has anyone else seen caching happening immediately before an action is performed on the dataset? Why does this happen?