Just time. We were already two weeks late on Round 8 due to a host of other issues. We'd like to do one round per month if we can get our routine ironed out.

We'll make it a priority to get them run in Round 9.

This doesn't equal out to 2.5 billion people a day. One requests does not equal a unique visitor. For most cases that doesn't even equal one page load. I don't know where the 29k/s number came from but I guess its a peak load from one of these bench marks. It isn't realistic to expect a server to be consistently pegged at 100% 24 hrs a day. The real number is going to be a tiny fraction of that

Sure, as long as your website is just a tiny piece of plain text, and all your requests are distributed perfectly evenly over the course of the day, and every person only requests a single file and then leaves. But since none of that is even remotely close to realistic, your numbers are not either. Yes, 29k req/s is quite slow for a "serve a tiny static file" benchmark. No, you can not handle a billion visitors a day on one server with such low performance.