@treyzania

Depending on what you’re using to view output – top, glances, htop, etc – labeling may be a little different, though if you’re referring to a line that looks something like (top on a Droplet):

%Cpu(s):  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st

Then us refers to time spent in user space and sy refers to time spent in kernel space.

This is a new Droplet that’s used for testing, so there’s really not much activity going on here, but if I were installing software or running more intensive processes, I’d see those numbers jumping around a bit.

Seeing a short spike isn’t a major issue, but if you’re seeing an 800% jump, then you need to find out what is causing the issue and see what can be done to resolve it. It may very well be that you simply don’t have enough CPU to quickly handle the tasks that are being ran, thus you’re overloading the single CPU core that you currently have.