The separate cron container made the most sense to me. Other variants “work” but imo are mostly workarounds to avoid setting up a real cronjob. Beyond this I have no real reason, nor can I vouch that is is more or less performant than others.
Yes, the mysqldump container is for easier restores. It’s much easier to restore from a .sql file than a raw data dir that was copied while the DB was running ;) (speaking from experience…)
Just want to say that I’ve been there. There was a time my Nextcloud install was incredibly slow. Fortunately (or unfortunately?), it is featureful enough and widely supported that once you figure this issue out, it is a nice service to keep running.
For me, adding Redis was essential. It doesn’t really make sense to me why (nothing I do on Nextcloud is intensive or data heavy) but it has greatly improved the performance of my app.
My entire setup is a containerized Nextcloud, Nextcloud Cron, MariaDB (if I knew Postgres was an option, I would’ve chosen that), and Redis: