What non malicious uses are there for ping's flood (-f) option? [closed]

I have been reading up on common ways in which people attack each other on the internet through things like DDOS attacks etc, and how one would defend oneself from such attacks, and I have come across the fact that with the Ubuntu ping tool there is a "Flood ping" option:

ping -f <WhatToPing>

So I would assume that there must be other uses for ping flooding then, other than the malicious DOS attack one, so that is really my question, in what circumstances would you normally use the -f option when not attempting to do something malicious?

Solution 1:

That's obviously ;-) to test whether your system hardening has worked out and that your TCP/IP stack will not be flooded by ping flooding any more …

E.g. that your system won't keel over by dropping the enormous amount of ICMP packets that it receives.

Solution 2:

This can be used to check if the network is reliable or if it is overloaded. The usual one ICMP message per seconds would be too slow for such purposes. Please note that 100 ICMP packets per seconds is very far from being a DOS attack in today's networks. That is only about 150 KB/s even if you specifically send unusually large ping messages.