If preload is specified, ping sends that many packets as fast as possible before continuing in its normal mode. Numeric output only. No attempt will be made to lookup symbolic names for host addresses. This is useful for diagnosing data-dependent problems in a network. For example, ping -p ff will cause the sent packet to be filled with all ones.
Nothing is displayed except the summary lines at startup time and when ping exits.
The default is 56, which translates into 64 ICMP data bytes when combined with the 8 bytes of ICMP header data. Duplicate and Damaged Packets Ping will report duplicate and damaged packets. Duplicate packets should never occur, and seem to be caused by inappropriate link-level retransmissions. Unfortunately, data-dependent problems have been known to sneak into networks and remain undetected for long periods of time. This means that if you have a data-dependent problem you will probably have to do a lot of testing to find it.