Files should automatically be uploaded to directories based on a token

It is a well known fact that if you upload thousands of files into a single directory you will have performance issues on certain systems such as Cloud systems using GlusterFS, NFS or other shared filesystems or simply slow hard drives. The reason being that list operations on that single directory take too much overhead over network.

The solution typically is to ensure there is no more than a couple of thousands of files in a single directory in your files/. This can be easily achieved through dividing directories by date:

https://drupal.org/project/filefield_paths provides this functionality but many people do not install it when they create their website and migration is complicated.

I propose that we automatically add date based tokens to all file system paths in Drupal core and allow modules such as FileField Paths to override these tokens to provide advanced functionality.