I have five tables in my database. Members, items, comments, votes and countries. I want to get 10 items. I want to get the count of comments and votes for each item. I also want the member that submitted each item, and the country they are from.

After posting here and elsewhere, I started using subselects to get the counts, but this query is taking 10 seconds or more!

SELECT `items_2`.*, 
   (SELECT COUNT(*) 
   FROM `comments` 
   WHERE (comments.Script = items_2.Id) 
   AND (comments.Active = 1)) 
  AS `Comments`, 
   (SELECT COUNT(votes.Member) 
   FROM `votes` 
   WHERE (votes.Script = items_2.Id) 
   AND (votes.Active = 1)) 
  AS `votes`, 
  `countrys`.`Name` AS `Country` 
FROM `items` AS `items_2` 
INNER JOIN `members` ON items_2.Member=members.Id AND members.Active = 1 
INNER JOIN `members` AS `members_2` ON items_2.Member=members.Id 
LEFT JOIN `countrys` ON countrys.Id = members.Country 
GROUP BY `items_2`.`Id` 
ORDER BY `Created` DESC 
LIMIT 10

My question is whether this is the right way to do this, if there's better way to write this statement OR if there's a whole different approach that will be better. Should I run the subselects separately and aggregate the information?