decode_entities() not found in statistics.module

I have also observed something similar, even with current HEAD. Only partial page seems to be sent to the browser, and it only happened in IE6.

Disabling page cache solved the problem. Strange.

I can verify this with IE 6.0 SP2 and drupal cache enabled.

Marked it as critical as it will break many sites.

Actually I did not test it on a clean install but had statistics logging enabled. Here is some debug.
This is what Internet Explorer sends

GET /?q=node HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: de
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
-
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 09:44:53 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.7b
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=9312462aa20e4c0c526faaaad7d6c971; expires=Mon, 20 Mar 2006 13:18:13 GMT; path=/
Last-Modified: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 09:44:45 GMT
ETag: "83eb41b72a25a09c584330bbb20d1c42"
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 1559
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
-
HERE IS GZ-ENCODED CONTENT
Fatal error:  Call to undefined function decode_entities() in /home/eberts/drupal/cvs/modules/statistics.module on line 81

Notice the Fatal error at the end? This might prevent IE6 to correctly decode the gzip encoded content.
So the next time you try to reload the page, IE sends and receives the following

GET /?q=node HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: de
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
If-Modified-Since: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 09:44:45 GMT
If-None-Match: "83eb41b72a25a09c584330bbb20d1c42"
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Host: www.example.com
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: PHPSESSID=9312462aa20e4c0c526faaaad7d6c971
-
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 09:45:50 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.55 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.55 OpenSSL/0.9.7b
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100

and thus uses his internal cached site (which it probably is not able to decode).

Whereas other browsers like Firefox or Opera are able to decode it correctly even with the Fatal error in plain text.

There seems to be two problems to worry about. The first, rather simple, is about fixing statistics.module.

The other might not because it is a general problem.

/**
 * Perform end-of-request tasks.
 *
 * This function sets the page cache if appropriate, and allows modules to
 * react to the closing of the page by calling hook_exit().
 */
function drupal_page_footer() {
  if (variable_get('cache', 0)) {
    page_set_cache();
  }

  module_invoke_all('exit');
}

*_exit is called even on cached pages, that is good to have for running statistics etc. but as soon as some exit hooks start to actually output content it will cause problems with the caching system as it might (on most systems it will) transfer the cache in gzip encoding -- but the output of the exit hook will be plain text.

exit hook should not be outputting anything. if it does, it should know that stuff might not always work.

sounds like a statistics bug

Has been fixed by Dries.

http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=26849