An alternative for pathauto and token
The main performance problem with tokens is the token UI/token browser. You can disable that by overriding theme_token_tree() and returning an empty string. What I once did on a site is replace it it with a link that was able load the browser using ajax, but even that didn't help anymore on a site with ~300 fields and lots of references.

Pathautho/Token don't depend on entity.module?