nmslib: Importing nmslib, cannot load any more object with static TLS

I am getting a dlopen error when importing nmslib after tensorflow:

python -c "import tensorflow; print(tensorflow.contrib); import nmslib"
 File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
<module 'tensorflow.contrib' from ...>
ImportError: dlopen: cannot load any more object with static TLS

(printing tensorflow contrib simulates importing a module that uses tensorflow, e.g. extending its classes)

switching the order gives no error, and everything works correctly. But in the context of a large code base, it is hard to ensure that nmslib is always imported first, since there are many entry-points. The same thing happens with tensorflow, and it looks similar to this issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50398358/import-error-when-unit-testing-flask-application-with-nmslib

This does not happen on my mac, but only on our Circle CI build, running in a circleci/python:3.6 docker image.

Any suggestions for how to fix this? I have tried setting the env variable CXXFLAGS="-fPIC -ftls-model=global-dynamic" when pip installing nmslib.