When you enable HTTP session persistence, the session file is not created during runtime, but only after you stop the server manually. This behavior is different than previous versions of JBoss (I tested on 4.0.2 and it seems to create the file during runtime). This should be a bug because this file will not be created if there is a server crash. One of the main reasons for persistent sessions is for fault tolerance, and on a single node, that means that the server should be able to recover sessions that were being used before the server crashed.