Waitopedia is a comprehensive resource of information about SQL Server waits.

The description shown below is the top answer as voted by the Spotlight community.

The charts are based on 2.1 TB of data collected from 4207 instances uploaded by 323 Spotlight users over an 8 week period.

PAGEIOLATCH_EX

Category: IO
SQL Server versions: 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017

What is PAGEIOLATCH_EX?

2 Answers

 

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

 

PAGEIOLATCH_EX is an exclusive buffer page latch. SQL Server requires a page not stored in the buffer cache, so allocates a buffer page and places the latch on the buffer page whilst the data is transferred from the disk.

Very common

This wait is very common for most instances

For each of 4207 instances, we ranked PAGEIOLATCH_EX on how frequent it is compared to all other recent waits. The chart shows the total of all rankings.

Prevalence of PAGEIOLATCH_EX across the Spotlight Population

For 38 % of hours with this wait, average wait time is less than 1.2 ms

For each instance, we found all the recent hours when it had a PAGEIOLATCH_EX wait. We found the average latency for each of those hours.

3792 instances contributed data to this chart

Latency Distribution of PAGEIOLATCH_EX across the Spotlight Population