This seems...wrong

So I have been having some terrible trouble with my Internet connection lately. One minute I will be totally fine with blazing fast speeds, the next I will be amassing the largest latency every created in human history. I ran a speed test just a minute ago and the results were surprising. I ran it a second time just to make sure there wasn't some kind of error in the test, but I got the same results. My download speed was 5.5 MB/s and my upload speed was a whopping 4 Mb/s. Both of these numbers are horribly off, but the upload result is the one that surprised me. Normally I have a download speed of 14+ Mb/s and an upload speed of no more than 1.5 Mb/s.

Could this be the source of my laggy connection? Anyone who has ever used a torrent client knows that you need to cap your upload speed or else your connection dies, but does the same concept apply to your overall Internet connection (This is an example to explain my reasoning, I am not using torrents right now)? If so, is there anything my ISP can do about it to permanently correct it?

Anyone who has ever used a torrent client knows that you need to cap your upload speed or else your connection dies, but does the same concept apply to your overall Internet connection (This is an example to explain my reasoning, I am not using torrents right now)? If so, is there anything my ISP can do about it to permanently correct it?

What ISP are you with?

And yes, but no. Torrenting in general can reduce your internet speed due to the number of connections being added and taken away without your upload speed even being high. It's just the way the protocol works.

Now, I don't know how to explain the crazy spike in upload. Perhaps your ISP is working on something into which your connection falls, or something of that sort. I'd say give them a call and ask if anything's been up lately.