Two PHP scripts interfere and I can't figure why - php

Question

These two pull out data from two different data bases. It's all good undtil I repeat the first one for a second time (to pull out the count of comments of more than one article), the second script (pulls out the data about vistis to the articles and arranges them by desc. order) stops working (no error, nothing, just doesn't provide an output). I'm no expert (yet) in the PHP so I can't seem to figure what is wrong in this sutuation. Maybe some of you will notice some obvious flaw which makes 'em interfere like that?
1st script (comment count). Just to make it clear: I don't use "define", the second time I use it for a diff. article. It's needed just in the first one to work.):
<?php
$id = "1"; //The ID of the page. You can get this from Manage -> Pages.
define('IN_COMMENTICS', '1');
require ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'comments/includes/db/connect.php');
$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `".$cmtx_mysql_table_prefix."comments` WHERE is_approved = '1' AND page_id = '$id'");
$total = mysql_num_rows($query);
echo $total;
?>
Second script (counts visits):
<?php
$sql = "SELECT pagename, hits, title FROM counts ORDER BY hits DESC LIMIT 10";
$res = mysql_query($sql);
if(!$res) {
// oops - exit?
}
while(list($page,$hits,$title) = mysql_fetch_row($res)) {
echo "<li><a href='$page'>$title</a> $hits</li>";
}
?>

Answer 1

The only thing I could see is that you are using the function require to include you database initializing file, AND its executed two times which my create problems to causing this issue you are facing.
Perhaps, consider using require_once function which will take care to not load the database initializing file more than one time.
To conclude, I would suggest to do the following
Replace this:
require ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'comments/includes/db/connect.php');
by this:
require_once ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'comments/includes/db/connect.php');