What determines if a bytea has 1 or 4 extra bytes?

Question

When inserting a BYTEA string in PostgreSQL the documentation says that such a string will occupy 1 or 4 bytes plus byte string length.

The question that I can't seem to find the answer to is what determines whether 1 or 4 bytes are added and is this effect consistent or will it vary depending on some factor or other?

Answer 1

I believe the answer is in this header comment of heaptuple.c:

* Before Postgres 8.3 varlenas always had a 4-byte length header, and
* therefore always needed 4-byte alignment (at least).  This wasted space
* for short varlenas, for example CHAR(1) took 5 bytes and could need up to
* 3 additional padding bytes for alignment.
*
* Now, a short varlena (up to 126 data bytes) is reduced to a 1-byte header
* and we don't align it.  To hide this from datatype-specific functions that
* don't want to deal with it, such a datum is considered "toasted" and will
* be expanded back to the normal 4-byte-header format by pg_detoast_datum.