Currently the mempool isn't persisted across restarts. The historical argument against doing this is that it would make transactions immortal. Expiration now addresses that issue.

Without preserving the mempool node behavior changes drastically across restarts which complicates production use (e.g. mining overly small/low fee blocks) as well as development testing. The lack of retention also causes the loss of txn priority modifications made with prioritisetransaction which makes the API less reliable.

{
    
    CAutoFile filein(OpenUndoFile(pos, true), SER_DISK, CLIENT_VERSION);
    if (filein.IsNull())
        return error("%s: OpenUndoFile failed", __func__);
    
    uint256 hashChecksum;
    try {
        filein >> blockundo;
        filein >> hashChecksum;
    }
    catch (const std::exception& e) {
        return error("%s: Deserialize or I/O error - %s", __func__, e.what());
    }
    
    CHashWriter hasher(SER_GETHASH, PROTOCOL_VERSION);
    hasher << hashBlock;
    hasher << blockundo;
    if (hashChecksum != hasher.GetHash())
        return error("%s: Checksum mismatch", __func__);
    return true;
}
bool AbortNode(const std::string& strMessage, const std::string& userMessage="")