More Performance Problems

I worked through trying to speed some variance calculations up today. I made use of the @CALCMODE(BLOCK) and @CALCMODE(BOTTOMUP). They helped a little bit, but I'm still not satisfied. Question of the day: does Direct I/O yield better performance on an empty cube getting data via a transparent partition than Buffered I/O? Doesn't seem to matter. I don't think the data file cache can be used on an empty cube. Not sure why the system takes up Index Cache in that case...