Specifying many fields in query string query vs. using the _all field

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I'm trying to figure out the best way to search using a query string query where each document in my index has several hundred fields/properties. For, for example, let's say this is a document:

{
	"employeeID": 123,
	"firstName": "John",
	"lastName": "Smith",
	"anotherField1": "value" ...
	...
	"anotherField200": "value"
}

Is there a performance disadvantage to specifying, say, 200 fields in my query, like:

GET /_search
{
	"query": {
		"query_string" : {
			"fields" : ["firstName", "lastName", "anotherField1"... "anotherField200"],
			"query" : "this AND that"
		}
	}
}

vs.

GET /_search
{
	"query": {
		"query_string" : {
			"query" : "this AND that"
		}
	}
}

which would query the _all field?

I would think so, but I haven't been able to find anything specifically saying this, or information about how many fields in a multi-field query is too many. I don't like the idea of using the _all field for several reasons - I would prefer to implement query-time boosting, and I'd like to apply different analyzers to some fields, to name a couple of reasons.

2

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