We found great success with the LIBLINEAR SVM implementation [1] though: Extremely good performance, to the point that it affects scalability too, with predictive performance acceptably close to libSVM with the RBF kernel, for a large cheminformatics dataset:

Paper (open acccess): http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13321-016-0151-5

As can be seen in fig 5 [2] in the paper, a dataset size that took ~1 week with libSVM (actually, the parallel piSVM implementation) on 64 cores, took less than a minute with LIBLINEAR, which runs on just one core.

[1] https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/liblinear

[2] http://jcheminf.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-016...