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.

if (showDebug)
        strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-feefilter", strprintf("Tell other nodes to filter invs to us by our mempool min fee (default: %u)", DEFAULT_FEEFILTER));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-loadblock=<file>", _("Imports blocks from external blk000??.dat file on startup"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-maxorphantx=<n>", strprintf(_("Keep at most <n> unconnectable transactions in memory (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_MAX_ORPHAN_TRANSACTIONS));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-maxmempool=<n>", strprintf(_("Keep the transaction memory pool below <n> megabytes (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_MAX_MEMPOOL_SIZE));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-mempoolexpiry=<n>", strprintf(_("Do not keep transactions in the mempool longer than <n> hours (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_MEMPOOL_EXPIRY));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-par=<n>", strprintf(_("Set the number of script verification threads (%u to %d, 0 = auto, <0 = leave that many cores free, default: %d)"),
        -GetNumCores(), MAX_SCRIPTCHECK_THREADS, DEFAULT_SCRIPTCHECK_THREADS));
#ifndef WIN32
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-pid=<file>", strprintf(_("Specify pid file (default: %s)"), BITCOIN_PID_FILENAME));
#endif
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-prune=<n>", strprintf(_("Reduce storage requirements by pruning (deleting) old blocks. This mode is incompatible with -txindex and -rescan. "
            "Warning: Reverting this setting requires re-downloading the entire blockchain. "
            "(default: 0 = disable pruning blocks, >%u = target size in MiB to use for block files)"), MIN_DISK_SPACE_FOR_BLOCK_FILES / 1024 / 1024));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-reindex-chainstate", _("Rebuild chain state from the currently indexed blocks"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-reindex", _("Rebuild chain state and block index from the blk*.dat files on disk"));
#ifndef WIN32
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-sysperms", _("Create new files with system default permissions, instead of umask 077 (only effective with disabled wallet functionality)"));
#endif
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-txindex", strprintf(_("Maintain a full transaction index, used by the getrawtransaction rpc call (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_TXINDEX));
    strUsage += HelpMessageGroup(_("Connection options:"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-addnode=<ip>", _("Add a node to connect to and attempt to keep the connection open"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-banscore=<n>", strprintf(_("Threshold for disconnecting misbehaving peers (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_BANSCORE_THRESHOLD));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-bantime=<n>", strprintf(_("Number of seconds to keep misbehaving peers from reconnecting (default: %u)"), DEFAULT_MISBEHAVING_BANTIME));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-bind=<addr>", _("Bind to given address and always listen on it. Use [host]:port notation for IPv6"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-connect=<ip>", _("Connect only to the specified node(s); -noconnect or -connect=0 alone to disable automatic connections"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-discover", _("Discover own IP addresses (default: 1 when listening and no -externalip or -proxy)"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-dns", _("Allow DNS lookups for -addnode, -seednode and -connect") + " " + strprintf(_("(default: %u)"), DEFAULT_NAME_LOOKUP));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-dnsseed", _("Query for peer addresses via DNS lookup, if low on addresses (default: 1 unless -connect/-noconnect)"));
    strUsage += HelpMessageOpt("-externalip=<ip>", _("Specify your own public address"));