What are your memory settings for utilizing the 360GB RAM with ElasticSearch?
Currently running with three ES data nodes per physical machine, with 30GB -Xmx allocated to each instance.
Can you explain how a positional query is a subset of boolean queries?
Intuitively it feels like the reverse would be true.
You're right, but the point here is that positional queries are boolean queries plus positions. For example, document that match 'a NEAR b' are a subset of documents matching 'a AND b'. So if 'a AND b' has no matches, there is no need to execute the more expensive 'a NEAR b'.