Errors in Alert Log

Hi all,

Since yesterday I have seen that one our dbs been spurting out:

Process m001 started up but failed with error = 20

in the alert log. I have a feeling that this might have caused our nightly RMAN backup to fail with the following error:

[SIZE=1][SIZE=3]RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00554: initialization of internal recovery manager package failed
RMAN-04005: error from target database:
ORA-00020: maximum number of processes (%s) exceeded

What does the alert log message mean? It happened at around 10pm which is when the backup starts to kick in. Any clues will be appreciated!

Thanks,
Chucksk

your processes parameters isnt big enough to cope with the number being created