Whew.  Added the relationship of strains to contigs.  Also dealt with a gigantic pain; the logs were recording every mysql insert query, which in some cases was several MB.  This would also cause mysqld to freak out, and not save the rec.  Added a file in config/initializers that would reduce the size of the string in the logs, but still allow the same import to the DB.  Log output to the screen still causes pretty significant slowdown, but no more failures