While update protocols generally induce lower miss rates than invalidate protocols, they tend to generate much traffic. This is one of the reasons why they are considered less cost-effectively scalable than invalidate protocols and, as a result, are avoided in most existing designs of scalable shared-memory multiprocessors. However, given the increasing relative cost of cache misses, update protocols are becoming more worthy of exploration. In this paper, we present a model of sharing that is key to investigating the performance of optimized update protocols: the update distance model. The model gives insight into the update patterns that optimized protocols need to handle. Using this model, we design a new family of protocols that we call distance-adaptive protocols. In these schemes, the directory records the update patterns observed and then uses them to selectively send updates and invalidations to processors. As a result, traffic and miss rates are kept low. We present an implementation of these protocols based on a dynamic pointer scheme. A performance comparison between one of these protocols and efficient invalidate and delayed competitive-update protocols over five applications shows that the new protocol decreases the execution time by an average of 15% and 10% respectively.