Count number of rows

[The Little Guy]

Is there a faster way to count the number of rows in a database other than mysql_num_rows? If there are over 10,000 reccords, wont mysql_num_rows be slower since you had to query all those rows first? I want to show how may records there are total in two different tables, one for number of users, and one for number of files(1 file = 1 row). So basically this will be on the home page, and will be ran many times, that seems like there will be too many connections to the database, if there are many page loads of the home page, then there are also many loads in the users section as well. Any other way to do this?

$sql = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `files`");
$sql2 = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `users`");
$rows_return = mysql_num_rows($sql);
$rows_return2 = mysql_num_rows($sql2);
echo $rows_return;
echo $rows_return2;

[Jessica]

"SELECT count(*) AS numRows FROM files"