APC has a nice feature where you can store PHP variables in shared memory. We can use that for our config array.

index.php
<?php
if(!$config = apc_fetch('config')) {
  require "./config.inc";
  apc_store('config',$config);
}
...
This takes us to 890 requests/second.

Of course, we can take this further and also cache the result of the database query for 5 minutes.

model.inc
<?php
function articles() {
 global $config;
 if(!$result = apc_fetch('result')) { 
  try {
    $dbh = new PDO($config['db'].':host='.$config['db_host'].';dbname='.$config['db_db'],
                   $config['db_user'],$config['db_pwd'],$config['db_opts']);
    $q = "select users.name, users.age, data.entry 
          from users,data where data.name = users.name;";
    $res = $dbh->query($q,PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);
    $result = $res->fetchAll();
    apc_store('result',$result,300);
  } catch (PDOException $e) {
    echo "Error!: " . $e->getMessage();
    die();
  }
 }
 return $result;
}
?>
This takes us to 1080 requests/second.

A final optimization is to get rid of an include file. Our utils.inc file was a bit useless.

utils.inc
<?php
function upper($arg) {
  return strtoupper($arg);
}
function boo() {
  echo "boo";
}
?>
We can add those 2 functions to model.inc and remove the require call. Now we get:

http_load
15000 fetches, 5 max parallel, 9e+07 bytes, in 13.6243 seconds
6000 mean bytes/connection
1100.97 fetches/sec, 6.60585e+06 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.295239 mean, 17.802 max, 0.114 min
msecs/first-response: 3.61389 mean, 1097.1 max, 0.739 min
HTTP response codes:
  code 200 -- 15000
Compare with our original:

http_load
1000 fetches, 5 max parallel, 6e+06 bytes, in 58.1026 seconds
6000 mean bytes/connection
17.2109 fetches/sec, 103266 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.403263 mean, 68.603 max, 0.194 min
msecs/first-response: 284.133 mean, 5410.13 max, 55.735 min
HTTP response codes:
  code 200 -- 1000