[Bitcoin-development] Large backlog of transactions building up?

[Mike Hearn]

Has anyone got long term longs that contain the pool size and timestamps?

Unfortunately I forgot to enable timestamps in the logs for my own
nodes (the privacy benefit of disabling this by default is
questionable, imho). But just looking at the general trends and
cross-checking against my own memory it definitely seems that there
are more and more pending transactions that don't get cleared into
blocks.

One of my nodes now routinely has 4000 transactions in the mempool.
Blocks typically clear only a few hundred at most, which is what you'd
expect given current transaction rates (around 300 per ten minute
interval). So what are the other pending transactions doing and why
aren't they getting drained out of the mempool?