Is 500,000 files in my home directory too much On my mac I did find ~/ in the terminal to list all the files in my home directory it listed over 500,000.  This seems like an awful lot to me and occasionally my computer is slow.  Is there any recommended maximum number of files to have?  Even though a lot of the files are little would they cause the file system index to get really large and unwieldy?
As pointed out in a comment, you're using a command that is locating files within directories below the directory in question.    While you may only be able to count to about 20 (fingers and toes) OS's are much much better at dealing with large numbers of files, and this is really an issue you shouldn't worry about. 

Now if your computer is slow, you might want to look into what is using memory.