Question: On my website I use PHP sessions. Session information is stored in files in my ./session path. After a few months I discovered that these session files are never deleted, by now there are 145.000 of them in this directory. 

How should these be cleaned up? Do I have to do it programmatically, or is ther a setting I can use somewhere that would have this cleanup happen automatically?

**EDIT** forgot to mention: This site runs at a provider, so I don't have access to a command line. I do have ftp-access, but the session files belong to another user (the one the webserver proces runs I guess) From the first answers I got I think it's not just a setting on the server or PHP, so I guess I'll have to implement something for it in PHP, and call that periodically from a browser (maybe from a cron job running on my own machine at home)

Answer: 
Use cron with find to delete files older than given threshold. 
For example to delete files that haven't been accessed for at least a week.

```
find .session/ -atime +7  -exec rm {} \;

```
My best guess would be that you are on a shared server and the session files are mixed along all users so you can't, nor you should, delete them. What you can do, if you are worried about scaling and/or your users session privacy, is to move sessions to the database.

Start writing that Cookie to the database and you've got a long way towards scaling you app across multiple servers when time is due.

Apart from that I would not worry much with the 145.000 files.