count the files in the sessions tempdir?
otherwise, you'd have to write a wrapper to session_start():
function my_session_start()
{
if( ! isset( $_SESSION[ 'sessioncounted' ] ) ) {
// new session
$_SESSION['sessioncounted'] = 1;
$count = trim( file('counter.txt')[0] );
$count = (int)$count + 1;
$fp = fopen( 'counter.txt', 'w');
fwrite( $fp, $count );
fclose( $fp );
}
session_start();
}