A local variable-size memory policy called the variable-interval sampled working set (VSWS) policy is described. The results of trace-driven simulation experiments reported here show that VSWS has a static performance comparable to those of the working set (WS) and sampled working set (SWS) policies, a dynamic performance better than those of WS, SWS, and the page fault frequency (PFF) policy, and similar to that of the damped working set (DWS) policy. Furthermore, VSWS generaly causes substantially less process suspensions than SWS, and is less expensive to implement than WS or DWS, since it requires the same hardware support as SWS and PFF. The sampling overhead of VSWS is comparable to that of SWS and lower than that of PFF.