This paper presents an adaptive limited pointers directory scheme which works better than the broadcast and the non-broadcast limited pointers schemes. The former is good at workloads comprising mostly-read data and the latter is good at workloads comprising frequently read / write data. The proposed adaptive scheme dynamically switches between the two according to the application sharing patterns. It works well for both types of workloads, and outperforms the previous schemes for the workloads having both the mostly-read and the frequently read / write data at the same time. The adaptive limited pointers scheme reduces the traffic volume of real workloads by up to 33%. Further, it can be implemented with minor addition to the directory memory overhead.