A method and apparatus for disambiguating in a dynamic binary translator is described. The method comprises selecting a code segment for load-store memory disambiguation based at least in part on a measure of likelihood of frequency of execution of the code segment; heuristically identifying one or more ambiguous memory dependencies in the code segment for disambiguation by runtime checks; based at least in part on inspecting instructions in the code segment, and using a pointer analysis of the code segment to identify all other ambiguous memory dependencies that can be removed by the runtime checks.