Troubleshoot.BytesBits

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My Download Speed Seems To Be Displayed Incorrectly

This is a common misconception. Shareaza displays downloads, uploads and network traffic in bits per second (b/s, bps) by default. Many other p2p clients use bytes (aka. B/s or Bps) as the standard unit of transfer. Bits always have the small "b" and bytes have the large "B". There are 8 bits in a byte.

Of course, a bit or byte is very small - this is why most things are measured in kilobits or kilobytes. Kilo equals a thousand of something, meaning a kilobit is 1000 bits. Same goes for bytes. If you want to measure even farther up, here's a table of prefixes.

  • Kilo: 1 Thousand
  • Mega: 1 Million
  • Giga: 1 Billion
  • Tera: 1 Trillion (!)


  • Bits: Used for internet traffic a lot. For that reason, Shareaza makes this unit the default. For example, a 56k modem can do up to 56 kilobits per second. If you have a broadband connection, it is very likely that you got your speed in kilobits (or megabits) also.
  • Bytes: Most commonly used for file sizes on hard disks and other media. An example is a CD-R- It stores up to 700MB or 700 Megabytes. A Floppy disk usually stores about 1.44 MB.

The units Shareaza displays can easily be changed by going into Shareaza Settings > Options > General and changing the combo box to either bits/second or bytes/second.