To add some more information:
the time taken for the above Hive query (select count(*) from my_table where member_id = 1234;) across different shards was:
- Shard 0, which has 3.18 GB data, 8102573 docs took 59 mins.
- Shard 8, which has 0.02 GB data, 32432 docs took 16 secs.
Some other shards have 7 GB of data, looks like it'll take 2-3 hrs on those shards.