What is PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait type in SQL Server?

Question

I have a query that is taking a long time in the middle of a transaction. When I get the wait_type of the process it is PAGEIOLATCH_SH. What does this wait type mean and how can this be resolved?

Answer 1

From MSDN:

PAGEIOLATCH_SH

Occurs when a task is waiting on a latch for a buffer that is in an I/O request. The latch request is in Shared mode. Long waits may indicate problems with the disk subsystem.

In practice, this almost always happens due to large scans over big tables. It almost never happens in queries that use indexes efficiently.

If your query is like this:

Select * from <table> where <col1> = <value> order by <PrimaryKey>

, check that you have a composite index on (col1, col_primary_key).

If you don't have one, then you'll need either a full INDEX SCAN if the PRIMARY KEY is chosen, or a SORT if an index on col1 is chosen.

Both of them are very disk I/O consuming operations on large tables.