I hate the checking permissions issue.

You may have to disable key checks before the DROP DATABASE

SET unique_checks = 0;
SET foreign_key_checks = 0;
SET GLOBAL innodb_stats_on_metadata = 0;
DROP DATABASE db_madeintouch;
SET GLOBAL innodb_stats_on_metadata = 1;
SET foreign_key_checks = 1;
SET unique_checks = 1;

UPDATE 2013-04-15 18:04 EDT

I just noticed you have innodb_file_per_table OFF. What gives ?

• You currently have all the InnoDB data and the corresponding index sitting in a single file.
• Any CREATE TABLE statement must make data dictionary updates and look for space (small but annoying in this instance)
• Internal Fragmentation of ibdata1
• Dropping a table means scanning the table and its indexes for availability to lock. With data and index pages possibly fragmented, this takes spindles, seek time, and latency.
• See Pictorial Representation of ibdata1 to see everything that goes into ibdata1

Recommendation : Remove all Data and Index Pages from ibdata1

This will give ibdata1 a breather to handle just data dictionary and MVCC management. In addition, ibdata1 will stay rather lean and mean and can be read more quickly.

You will need to perform the InnoDB Infrastructure Cleanup. I wrote out all the steps back on October 29, 2010 in StackOverflow.

UPDATE 2013-04-22 08:10 EDT

Three suggestions

SUGGESTION 1 : I just noticed something else. You are using an ancient version of MySQL (5.0.45). You should think about upgrading to MySQL 5.6.11 as it performs significantly faster that MySQL 5.5 and way faster than MySQL 5.0.

SUGGESTION 2 : You should also go ahead and implement the InnoDB Infrastructure Cleanup.

SUGGESTION 3 : You should also check the disk itself. If the data is sitting on a RAID10 set, one of the disks may have an issues. Check the disk controller's battery as well because it can slow down disk caching and affect read performance.

Since Zapier is coming in from outside your instance, a possible cause of your problem is the security group for your instance. Most ports on EC2 instances (except the SSH port) are normally blocked by default unless you explicitly open them.

So you would need to open the mysql port 3306 on your instance up to the ip address Zapier is coming in from. (preferably you would not open it up to everyone in the world.)

See Using Amazon RDS/EC2 on the Zapier site, starting from the section where it says Can't Connect to My Database. They continue on to provide specific instructions for the security group settings.

You will also probably need to grant permission on the database using the mysql GRANT command to the user coming in from the Zapier ip address.

Something like this should work :

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES
ON mydb.*
TO 'user'@'54.86.9.50'
IDENTIFIED BY 'newpassword';

Or you can allow that user to come in from any ip adress like this:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES
ON mydb.*
TO 'user'@'%'
IDENTIFIED BY 'newpassword';

(Incoming requests would still be limited to Zapier ip addresses due to the security group settings.)