I ask because I sent a 256byte transaction with a 2KSat fee almost 5 days ago and still no confirmations.
What is your txid? I will look at it for you 
Thus I keep checking the number of unconfirmed tx and thus I keep seeing how high it it. But I haven't found a bitcointalk thread discussing this current situation/attack and I'm really starting to wonder what's happening.
There is not actually a "number" of unconfirmed tx on the network. Each node has it's own policy of which tx to relay, some based off of size verses tx fee and some based off of who is sending/receiving the tx. For example, if you were to "ask" eligius how many unconfirmed transactions there are, they would give you a much smaller number then if you "asked" AntPool.
Kind Regards
Good point about the fact that there's not actually an official number of unconfirmed tx on the network. I understand. However, I can look at http://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions and see that there are currently more than 19K transactions waiting for confirmation according to one particular node. When I looked at this page anytime in the past few years it tended to be between 500 and 1500 unconfirmed transactions, so the change is an order of magnitude. I think that kind of scale overcomes any sort of difference between nodes. Ie, it's not the case that bci has 19K unconfirmed tx and antpool has 500. The same page shows that transactions are being sent at approx 0.8 per second. These numbers are simply much higher than they were a month ago. Something is happening. I'm just trying to figure out what.
