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.
PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait type usually comes up as the result of fragmented or unoptimized index.
Often reasons for excessive PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait type are:
I/O subsystem has a problem or is misconfigured
Overloaded I/O subsystem by other processes that are producing the high I/O activity
Bad index management
Logical or physical drive misconception
Network issues/latency
Memory pressure
Synchronous Mirroring and AlwaysOn AG
In order to try and resolve having high PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait type, you can check:
SQL Server, queries and indexes, as very often this could be found as a root cause of the excessive PAGEIOLATCH_SH wait types
For memory pressure before jumping into any I/O subsystem troubleshooting
Always keep in mind that in case of high safety Mirroring or synchronous-commit availability in AlwaysOn AG, increased/excessive PAGEIOLATCH_SH can be expected.