The performance of speaker recognition system is highly dependent on the amount of speech used in enrollment and test. This work presents a detailed experimental review and analysis of the GMM-SVM based speaker recognition system in presence of duration variability. This article also reports a comparison of the performance of GMM-SVM classifier with its precursor technique Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) classifier in presence of duration variability. The goal of this research work is not to propose a new algorithm for improving speaker recognition performance in presence of duration variability. However, the main focus of this work is on utterance partitioning (UP), a commonly used strategy to compensate the duration variability issue. We have analysed in detailed the impact of training utterance partitioning in speaker recognition performance under GMM-SVM framework. We further investigate the reason why the utterance partitioning is important for boosting speaker recognition performance. We have also shown in which case the utterance partitioning could be useful and where not. Our study has revealed that utterance partitioning does not reduce the data imbalance problem of the GMM-SVM classifier as claimed in earlier study. Apart from these, we also discuss issues related to the impact of parameters such as number of Gaussians, supervector length, amount of splitting required for obtaining better performance in short and long duration test conditions from speech duration perspective. We have performed the experiments with telephone speech from POLYCOST corpus consisting of 130 speakers.