As others said, in Java its generally better to use lot of short methods, because they are JITed and inlined better.
But it's plausible that in EE enviroment situation can be different. At least for method that are not simply called, but there is aditional overhead because of 1) Transaction handling, 2) Interceptors 3) EJB remote calls (stay away from highly granual remote calls)
But if you split large method into multiple private methods, these overheads should not happen.
tl,dr:
Method call itself is not problem, additional overhead is (and you have controll over it)
PS: I would not even consider NOT splitting methods for performance reasons untill proven there actually is some performance problem. With clearer code you usually achieve better performance, because you much easier identify parts that are 1) not actually needed 2) are called multiple times with same result
-XX:MaxInlineSize=#
and-XX:CompileThreshold=#
in the Hotspot JVM. nerds-central.blogspot.com/2009/09/… along with blog.leenarts.net/2010/05/26/dontcompilehugemethods are good reads too. You have some misconceptions about how things are working under the covers. – MichaelT Sep 12 '14 at 20:46