What Are SQL Server Waits and Wait Types?

what SQL Server has been waiting on when executing queries? 

three categories of waits that could affect any given request:

• Resource waits are caused by a particular resource, perhaps a specific lock that is unavailable when the requested is submitted. Resource waits are the ones you should focus on for troubleshooting the large majority of performance issues.
• External waits occur when SQL Server worker thread is waiting on an external process, such as extended stored procedure to be completed. External wait does not necessarily mean that the connection is idle; rather it might mean that SQL Server is executing an external code which it cannot control. Finally the queue waits occur if a worker thread is idle and is waiting for work to be assigned to it.
• Queue waits normally apply to internal background tasks, such as ghost cleanup, which physically removes records that have been previously deleted. Normally you don't have to worry about any performance degradation due to queue waits.

Some of Wait types:

1)ASYNC_NETWORK_IO - Network

2)BACKUPIO - Backup
3)CXPACKET - Query Used to synchronize threads involved in a parallel query. This wait type only means a parallel query is executing.
4)WAITFOR - Background

5)LCK_M_IX- Lock

• ASYNC_NETWORK_IO: the classic cause of this wait type is RBAR (Row-By-Agonizing-Row) processing of results in a client, instead of caching the results client-side and telling SQL Server to send more. A common misconception is that this wait type is usually caused by network problems – that’s rarely the case in my experience.
• CXPACKET: this wait type always accrues when parallelism happens, as the control thread in a parallel operation waits until all threads have completed. However, when parallel threads are given unbalanced amounts of work to do, the threads that finish early also accrue this wait type, leading to it maybe becoming the most prevalent. So this one could be benign, as the workload has lots of good parallelism, but could be malignant if there’s unwanted parallelism or problems causing skewed distribution of work among parallel threads.
• LCK_M_IX: this wait type occurs when a thread is waiting for a table or page IX lock so that a row insert or update can occur. It could be from lock escalation to a table X or S lock causing all other threads to wait to be able to insert/update.
• LCK_M_X: this wait type commonly occurs when lock escalation is happening. It could also be caused by using a restrictive isolation level like REPEATABLE_READ or SERIALIZABLE that requires S and IS locks to be held until the end of a transaction. Note that distributed transactions change the isolation level to SERIALIZABLE under the covers – something that’s bitten several of our clients before we helped them. Someone could also have inhibited row locks on a clustered index causing all inserts to acquire page X locks – this is very uncommon though.

Currently Running Queries to track what happening/currently running  in SQL Server?

T-SQL Script:

DECLARE @OpenQueries TABLE (cpu_time INT, logical_reads INT, session_id INT)

INSERT INTO @OpenQueries(cpu_time, logical_reads, session_id)
select r.cpu_time ,r.logical_reads, r.session_id
from sys.dm_exec_sessions as s inner join sys.dm_exec_requests as r 
on s.session_id =r.session_id and s.last_request_start_time=r.start_time
where is_user_process = 1
and s.session_id <> @@SPID
waitfor delay '00:00:01'
select substring(h.text, (r.statement_start_offset/2)+1 , ((case r.statement_end_offset when -1 then datalength(h.text)  else r.statement_end_offset end - r.statement_start_offset)/2) + 1) as text
, r.cpu_time-t.cpu_time as CPUDiff 
, r.logical_reads-t.logical_reads as ReadDiff
, r.wait_type
, r.wait_time
, r.last_wait_type
, r.wait_resource
, r.command
, r.database_id
, r.blocking_session_id
, r.granted_query_memory
, r.session_id
, r.reads
, r.writes, r.row_count, s.[host_name]
, s.program_name, s.login_name
from sys.dm_exec_sessions as s inner join sys.dm_exec_requests as r 
on s.session_id =r.session_id and s.last_request_start_time=r.start_time
left join @OpenQueries as t on t.session_id=s.session_id
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(r.sql_handle) h
where is_user_process = 1
and s.session_id <> @@SPID
order by 3 desc