Can You Use Mempool RPC Without Completing IBD?

I was digging into mempool stuff lately and decided to try out the mainnet. But I've hit a wall. My node needs to finish the initial block download first to fill the mempool. I'm kinda worried if my experiment will actually work. Is there a way to use the importmempool RPC to make this happen?

What's your end goal here? I don't think you can confirm anything from an imported mempool if your blockchain isn't up to date. Looks like you might be stuck waiting for Bitcoin Core to finish syncing.

Not sure, but don’t some block explorers have APIs for this type of thing? It could save you some hassle.

Yeah, but the mempool size is a mess. It’s over 900MB in many places. Different nodes have different settings. If one has a 300MB limit and another has 1024MB, you're gonna get different results. So unless you know what you're querying, it’s a gamble.

I haven't seen an 'importmempool' command in Bitcoin Core. Are you sure you’re not looking at some other node? Can you clarify that? Also, what's this 'experiment' you're running? Would help the community give better advice.

Oh, I just saw that it got merged a few weeks back and will be in the next release. Surprised OP is using a dev build.