Byobu showing very high network speed

Very recently I started Byobu on my VPS. I use Putty to access the VPS via SSH and sometimes my connection goes out.
All my running tasks used to suffer. So I found this nifty tool Byobu which is an awesome mix of screen and tmux. We can select whichever we like best and work with that. It also has an amazing status bar.
I use my VPS sometimes for downloading some files and I saw that when I start a download it shows very high download speeds but when I check the download with a tool like speedometer it shows that the actual speed was much less.

I thought that there was something wrong with byobu. But turns out it actually shows the network speed in bits per second instead of bytes. So, there wasn’t actually anything wrong with byobu.

A simple fix is to open:
/$HOME/.byobu/statusrc

and add line:
NETWORK_UNITS=bytes

Also, if you want to monitor just 1 interface then add line:
MONITORED_NETWORK=venet0

You’ll see the difference as soon as you save the file.

This was a real head-scratcher for me, but I hope this helps you 🙂