I wasn't able to continue the thread in http://groups.google.com/group/web2py/browse_frm/thread/a81248fec1dcef81/
So... I imagine that I would have lots of files say some 10 000 or more. :) I think with ext3/ext2... filesystems so many files in one directory is a mess. Is there absoute out of question to have upload/download to handle this issue in trunk? I think of some kind of directory structure like one directory (say upload/0) has X number of files then the new one (upload/1) is created and the new files are stored in it... ...and download could handle it out of the box. Or the generated filenames first or first two character is the directory name under upload/ and the file is stored under that directory... it could be a Field switch which defaults to the old behavior...
