sessions... thousands of them

[davo]

I'm backing up a site to local and I've noticed an unusual amount of files in /site/assets/sessions/

There are literally thousands of files called sess_*

Should these be in there by the thousnds?

[teppo]

You might want to try what Ryan suggests here: http://processwire.com/talk/topic/1142-lots-of-sessions/?p=30237. Session garbage cleaning isn't currently working on certain systems with default config (more about that here).

Garbage cleaning for sessions is always random and it's possible that it just hasn't happened for a while. Hard to say without knowing a bit more about your environment, how often new sessions are created etc. Anyway, above solution shouldn't cause any harm either, so I'd try if it helps.