  In this review I briefly describe the latest advances in studies of aperiodic
variability of accreting X-ray binaries and outline the model which currently
describe the majority of observational appearances of variability of accreting
sources in the best way. Then I concentrate on the case of luminous accreting
neutron star binaries (in the soft/high spectral state), where study of
variability of X-ray emission of sources allowed us to resolve long standing
problem of disentangling the contribution of accretion disk and
boundary/spreading layer components to the time average spectrum of sources.
The obtained knowledge of the shape of the spectrum of the boundary layer
allowed us to make estimates of the mass and radii of accreting neutron stars.
