What are the dangers of setting a high limit to max File Descriptors per process

That is certainly not trivial task that can't be done in userspace. Fortunately, it is possible to do on Linux, using cgroup mechanizm and its blkio controller.

Setting up cgroup is somehow distribution specific as it may already be mounted or even used somewhere. Here's general idea, however (assuming you have proper kernel configuration):

mount -t tmpfs cgroup_root /sys/fs/cgroup
mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio
mount -t cgroup -o blkio none /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio

Now that you have blkio controller set, you can use it:

mkdir -p /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio/limit1M/
echo "X:Y  1048576" > /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio/limit1M/blkio.throttle.write_bps_device 

Now you have a cgroup limit1M that limits write speed on device with major/minor numbers X:Y to 1MB/s. As you can see, this limit is per device. All you have to do now is to put some process inside of that group and it should be limited:

echo $PID > /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio/limit1M/tasks

I don't know if/how this can be done on other operating systems.

According to the kernel documentation, /proc/sys/fs/file-max is the maximum, total, global number of file descriptors the kernel will allocate before choking. This is the kernel's limit, not your current user's. So you can open 590432, provided you're alone on an idle system (single-user mode, no daemons running).

Note that the documentation is out of date: the file has been /proc/sys/fs/file-max for a long time. Thanks to Martin Jambon for pointing this out.

The difference between soft and hard limits is answered here, on SE. You can raise or lower a soft limit as an ordinary user, provided you don't overstep the hard limit. You can also lower a hard limit (but you can't raise it again for that process). As the superuser, you can raise and lower both hard and soft limits. The dual limit scheme is used to enforce system policies, but also allow ordinary users to set temporary limits for themselves and later change them.

Note that if you try to lower a hard limit below the soft limit (and you're not the superuser), you'll get EINVAL back (Invalid Argument).

So, in your particular case, ulimit (which is the same as ulimit -Sf) says you don't have a soft limit on the size of files written by the shell and its subprocesses. (that's probably a good idea in most cases)

Your other invocation, ulimit -Hn reports on the -n limit (maximum number of open file descriptors), not the -f limit, which is why the soft limit seems higher than the hard limit. If you enter ulimit -Hf you'll also get unlimited.