Julie Behrens, via Kevin Hill, covers the concept of virtual log files:
It is especially evident there is an issue with VLFs when SQL Server takes a long time to recover from a restart. Other symptoms may be slowness with autogrowth, log shipping, replication, and general transactional slowness. Anything that touches the log file, in other words.
Read on to understand how to figure out if you have a problem with virtual log file counts and a resolution.