Just goes to show how many people on Bitcointalk are actually running full nodes. Unconfirmed tx's have been creeping slowly down from 10,000 for the past 2 weeks on my node.
That's strange. I have maxmempool set to 4096MB on my node and unconfirmed tx's have dropped to around 2,200. Am I connected mostly to crap nodes that don't relay?
Don't forget this setting:
-mempoolexpiry=
Do not keep transactions in the mempool longer than hours (default: 72)
I do indeed have the setting at the default 72 hours (I guess I can go a lot more with the mempool config that I have), but comparing apples to apples my node still had more than double the current 2,200 unconfirmed tx's just a few days ago.
I guess that there really is no "the mempool", even to the extent that some nodes might have mempool going up in size at the same time as others are going down.